The Well-Being Equation: Investigating Critics, Negative Emotions, and Demotivation in the Workplace

Criticism as a result of an evaluation process is a common topic of everyday communication within the working environment. The research starts from the assumption that criticism significantly affects the self-perception of employees and it evokes negative emotions that in the end influence job satisfaction and motivation to perform work tasks. The paper presents the frame of a new concept of impact that the criticism has on employee motivation and the first results of the study prove that concept in particular. The main aim was to define whether criticism expressed inappropriately evokes more negative emotions. Hypotheses that focus on its correlation with gender, age, level of education and work status are discussed in the continuation of the paper. The research was conducted on 520 participants in Croatia. The results show a significant impact of the quality of communication on the perception of criticism and its significance in correlation with gender, while hypotheses that correlated evoking negative emotions when expressing criticism within the working environment with age, level of education and work status were rejected. The hypothesis about the correlation between expressing criticism inappropriately and the occurrence of demotivation was rejected. Implications for Central European audience: The working environment is recently focusing on the digital transformation of all processes and so communication as well. By this transformation, people become alienated and lose basic communication skills. This paper brings together the presentation of long-established communication starting points and the most modern thinking and research on the impact of communication on the motivation, satisfaction and productivity of employees. Based on this, but also with the presented results of the conducted research, it proposes a new communication concept of communicating negative messages that are an integral part of everyday business communication in the organization.