Paul Green, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School, and two colleagues studied field data from a company that used a transparent peer-review process and also gave its 300 employees some say in defining their jobs and, thus, over whom they worked with. The researchers’ analysis revealed that critical appraisals from colleagues drove employees to adjust their roles to be around people who would give them more-positive reviews. The conclusion: Negative feedback rarely leads to improvement.

Mr. Green, defend your research.

Green: When people in this organization received what we call “disconfirming feedback,” they would try to move away from the coworkers who had offered it, and they would look for new and different relationships. And the more negative feedback they received, the further the employees would go to forge new networks.

My colleagues—Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats—and I also replicated this result in a lab study where we gave subjects feedback, ostensibly from a partner, on a short story they had written. People who received negative feedback, we found, were far more likely to seek a new partner for their next task than those who received confirming feedback.

HBR: Could you actually map this pattern in the company with the transparent peer reviews?

Yes. If the relationship was discretionary—that is, if people didn’t have to work together—the person who got the negative feedback would usually just disappear from that social network. If the employees had to work together, the recipient of the feedback would look out in the organization for other people to connect with to offset the feedback. They’d form more relationships with people in different departments or other offices. We call this “shopping for confirmation.”

Shopping can be fun.

In this case, it seems like it’s psychologically necessary. Even though the negative feedback is supposed to help, it’s perceived as a threat. Shopping for confirmation is grounded in the idea that a positive view of one’s self requires social connections that help us sustain that view. If we don’t have them, we’ll look for them.

People who received criticism from peers looked for new relationships.

Are you saying that negative feedback doesn’t work?

It doesn’t provide the sustenance we need to maintain a positive view of ourselves. And that’s the ultimate irony. The idea behind performance appraisals, and feedback in general, is that to grow and improve, we must have a light shined on the things we can’t see about ourselves. We need the brutal truth. There’s an assumption that what motivates people to improve is the realization that they’re not as good as they think they are. But in fact, it just makes them go find people who will not shine that light on them. It may not be having the intended effect at all.

Feedback that’s always positive seems reasonably useless, though.

Because the assumption is that feedback will motivate us to perform a certain way. All we’re saying is that while it may do some of that, it motivates us to do other things, too, like find friends who won’t give us negative feedback. People come to work with many motivations. I’m not saying they won’t want to improve if they find out they’re weak in something. But they also need to know that they’re valued and that their contributions are generally positive. We put employees in a position to deal with dueling motivations: I need to feel I’m valuable, and I need to improve. And we don’t do a good job reconciling them with our feedback mechanisms.

Should we bookend negative feedback with positive feedback, then? No. That’s not a great strategy. It’s not about itemizing the feedback and saying, “You did this well. You do this poorly. You did this well. You do this poorly.” It’s about accompanying negative feedback with validation of who people are and of their value to the organization. And it’s not even about providing it all the time. People just need to feel valued.

So what we need to do is offer broader affirmations about employees’ inherent goodness and value?

Yes. In another lab study, we gave subjects a set of negative feedback similar to the feedback in the creative-writing exercise but also gave them an opportunity to self-affirm by asking them to write for 10 minutes about the values that were most important to them. When we did that, the shopping-for-confirmation effect almost disappeared completely.

Subjects who got negative feedback from a partner asked for a new partner.

We should be able to craft a performance appraisal process to work in a similar manner. Feedback will motivate someone to improve probably only if this broader affirmation genuinely exists. This makes sense if we think about it in the context of personal relationships. Quite often I get disconfirming feedback from my spouse.

I can relate to that.

But never once has it made me shop for confirmation or say, “I need to end this relationship.” Because the feedback she’s giving me is in the context of a broader, relatively positive and confirming relationship.

Do managers buy into your hypothesis here?

I think they have to. Peer-review mechanisms are in place in more than 50% of organizations, and they’re ubiquitous at large companies. And I’d argue that the assumptions being made about what feedback inspires are very naive. There’s more going on than we think when we tell someone they don’t do something well and need to do it better. People are complex. The logic of negative feedback alone closing the gap between my view of myself and how others see me—it’s not at all that simple.

Is shopping for confirmation an innate drive? Can we decide not to do it?

I doubt it. As I said, negative feedback manifests itself as a psychological threat. And over the last two to three decades, a body of research has shown that that kind of threat has not only behavioral consequences but physical ones as well: Lethargy. Anxiety. Depression. I think we can’t help reacting to it by doing something that will make us feel better. Whether it’s conscious or not, we don’t know. It’s probably a little of both, but it’s such a fundamental, deep-seated drive to want a circle of people around us that will prop us up. And we’ll go to great measures to create that circle if we have to.

What we see in the data is that current feedback systems trigger this reaction of constructing a surrounding group that will protect us from experiencing critical input. It’s the definition of an echo chamber. So feedback not only doesn’t work but leads to social formations that will prevent it from ever working.

Does any of this apply to what’s happening with the news and social media, where we seem to surround ourselves with like-minded content? This is a little outside our study’s context, but I think what we see on the national political stage is remarkably similar. People tend to identify very strongly with their political views. There’s plenty of evidence that they will flee sources that disconfirm those beliefs and seek a more hospitable and confirming environment.

Negative feedback is a psychological threat and leads to anxiety and depression.

But any form of echo chamber ultimately weakens us. If you surround yourself with those who constantly prop you up, you’re willfully being blind to any aspect of yourself, or your political or social identity, that might need improvement. In political, social, and work realms, the people who thrive will be those who can sit down and engage with the threatening views of others and then take those insights and honestly try to apply them.

Do you want to do more research on feedback mechanisms?

Absolutely. We want to understand how all this works so that we can craft better mechanisms. I think it starts with creating a confirming environment and confirming relationships, where feedback of all kinds won’t lead to this threat state. An awful lot about organizations just doesn’t lend itself to such an environment: Competition for promotions. Negative financial results. Downsizing. These put up walls between people. We want to build structures without so many walls. It’s hard to do. But it’s solvable. We’ve taken one step.

I have to say, your performance in this interview was subpar. I was hoping for better.

Let me talk to another editor there. I’d bet they’d think it was pretty good.