Does negative feedback motivate workers, or deter learning?

Receiving negative feedback from your manager after missing a deadline or underperforming can be upsetting, even if it’s intended to boost professional growth.

How employees internalise and respond to criticism is complex, so is giving negative feedback always the right managerial approach?

Previous research has provided useful insights into how an individual’s intrapersonal skills, like self-evaluation, impact how they perceive and respond to negative feedback. But those studies forget that in the workplace, employees are communicating and building relationships with other people and learning within a social context.

By using achievement goal theory – which groups people into goal orientation categories according to what motivates them to complete a task – our research shows how understanding those social interactions can help managers use negative feedback effectively to activate a growth mindset in certain personality types. Crucially, it also shows when negative feedback can be damaging and should be avoided. 

What we know about negative feedback

When a manager gives negative feedback to an employee whose performance falls short of expectations, the intention is usually to highlight where there’s room for improvement and promote learning.

But research has so far failed to provide conclusive evidence that it works. In fact, it’s often proved contradictory, with some studies arguing negative feedback encourages reflection and experimentation and others finding it damages self-esteem and triggers defensive reactions.

What motivates workers to ask for help?

We wanted to provide a more nuanced understanding of how negative feedback impacts workplace learning, so we started by thinking about the different types of learners.

Autonomous help-seekers ask for help independently and are driven by an aspiration to learn and master a skill or challenge so they can resolve it independently in the future. Dependent help-seekers on the other hand ask for help to solve an immediate problem and usually rely on others to fix it.

Autonomous help-seeking promotes long-term development and is better for the employee and the manager.

To help us explore this more deeply, we used achievement goal theory.

Why different goal mindsets matter

Different people are motivated to achieve a goal for different reasons, and those different reasons shape their behaviour in the social context of the workplace.

Achievement goal theory divides people into mastery and performance goal orientations, with concepts of approach and avoidance also applied. Because our focus was on clarifying the relationship between negative feedback and learning through asking for help, we focused on two specific groups.

Some people want to learn; they don’t fear it and approach learning with a positive and proactive mindset. They don’t mind asking for help because they see knowledge sharing as an opportunity to learn. Achievement goal theory refers to them as having a state mastery goal orientation.

Other people are fearful of failure; they feel less capable and their approach to learning is passive and inactive. They don’t like to ask for help for fear of looking incompetent or losing face. Achievement goal theory refers to this group as having a state performance avoidance orientation.

Exploring employee behaviour

We wanted to know if negative feedback could trigger a state mastery goal response, so we recruited workers and their managers from five companies in China, spanning hardware and software development, education and training, and financial services.

The first part of our study paired employees with their managers and collected data at two-week intervals recording how they responded to feedback in their workplace and rating their learning performance. The second part of our study saw the employees work through a number of online scenarios where they were either given negative feedback or no feedback.

Negative feedback isn’t always bad

Our study confirmed that negative feedback isn’t inherently good or bad, it can work with the right employees and within the right type of learning environment.

The real gamechanger is how the employee responds afterwards and the type of help they seek, and much of that depends on their goal orientation.

In employees with a state mastery goal orientation, negative feedback triggers that mastery mindset. They want to improve so they ask for help as autonomous help-seekers who can solve problems independently, boosting their long-term workplace learning.

However, negative feedback won’t help employees with a state performance avoidance orientation, instead, it triggers their avoidance mindset. In response, they will often ask someone else to solve the problem for them as dependent help-seekers, and that shortcut undermines their long-term development.

Our findings provide evidence-based recommendations for how managers can help employees respond positively to feedback. 

Get to know your employees

The best way to motivate your employees and maximise their learning opportunities is to understand them on an individual level and identify their goal orientation, so that you can tailor your feedback.

Consider their previous work, learning behaviour and how they have responded to different types of feedback. Assign different types of task, some easy and some more challenging, to see how they respond. By observing their interactions, you should be able to determine whether they have a dominant mastery goal orientation or a performance avoidance orientation. 

Tailor your feedback

Employees with a mastery goal orientation will thrive when there’s a challenge and won’t be scared by negative feedback. In fact, it can motivate them, so don’t be afraid to criticise and give them the freedom and autonomy to learn independently.

Avoid using negative feedback with employees who are high in performance avoidance. Instead, give them extra reassurance. Frame feedback as developmental and focus on incremental progress that is less likely to trigger their performance avoidance tendencies.

Create the right learning environment

Make sure your workplace environment frames criticism as an opportunity to grow and not as a threat, so that it fosters a mastery goal mindset and autonomous help-seeking.

You can do this by using language that emphasises learning, by modelling curiosity yourself and offering support for trying new approaches.

By encouraging autonomous help-seeking and discouraging over-reliance on others, you can turn even the most critical feedback into a powerful engine for employee growth.

Read the article: “When does negative feedback promote or undermine employee learning? The interpersonal mechanism of goal-driven help-seeking”, Shuwei Hao (School of Management, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, China), Lynda Jiwen Song, Ahmed Mohammed Sayed Mostafa (Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds), Ping Han and Qiushi Wang (School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China), Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, June 2026.