Destructive criticism revisited: Appraisals, task outcomes, and the moderating role of competitiveness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Destructive criticism is negative feedback that is inconsiderate in style and content, which exists at the intersection of performance feedback and interpersonal mistreatment. The current research integrates these literatures with an investigation of the effects of destructive versus constructive criticism from a co-worker on recipients’ relational appraisals, emotions, and task outcomes. Drawing from theorizing about cognitive appraisals after personal affronts, we first propose that those who experience destructive criticism are more likely than those who experience constructive criticism to (a) perceive that the feedback-giver intended to harm them, (b) blame the feedback-giver, (c) distrust the feedback-giver, and (d) feel anger. Second, with regard to task-related outcomes, we extend research on trait moderators of feedback responses to the study of destructive criticism. We draw from feedback intervention theory (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996) regarding how feedback may alter the locus of attention to be either self- or task-focused, and investigate a trait that may shift one’s attention to the self after destructive criticism. Specifically, we proposed that trait competitiveness—i.e. a desire to win over others—interacts with type of criticism to predict task-related outcomes. The results of two experiments—a scenario study and a behavioral experiment—provide support for our arguments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".