How Do You Take Feedback?
Whether criticism moves you to improve or moves you to defend yourself
Some people treat feedback as free information and others treat it as an attack to survive, and the difference predicts how much people actually change after being told something is wrong. The scale behind this test splits that overall receptiveness into four separate pieces: how useful you believe feedback is, how responsible you feel for acting on it, how much you weigh what it does to your image in front of others, and how confident you are that you can actually make sense of it.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about feedback in general - at work, from a coach, from anyone evaluating what you do - not about one bad review you once received.
What it measures
The four dimensions of the Feedback Orientation Scale: utility (do you believe feedback actually helps), accountability (do you feel it is your job to act on it), social awareness (how much you weigh what feedback does to your standing with others), and self-efficacy for feedback (confidence in your ability to process and use it). It differs from our general self-efficacy test, which is about confidence in tasks broadly, and from our psychological safety test, which describes a team climate rather than a personal disposition.
Based on: Feedback Orientation Scale (Linderbaum & Levy, 2010)
Possible results
Utility
Whether you believe feedback actually helps you improve.
Accountability
Whether you feel it is on you to do something with feedback once you have it.
Social awareness
How much you weigh what feedback does to your standing with others.
Feedback self-efficacy
Confidence in your own ability to process and use feedback.
Common questions
Is a low score here the same as being thin-skinned?
Not exactly. Feedback orientation is about your general stance toward feedback as a category, not about how upset you get in the moment - someone can feel hurt by a specific comment and still, overall, believe feedback is useful and act on it once the sting fades. The four dimensions here separate belief, action, image concern and confidence, which is more precise than a single 'sensitive or not' label.
Can feedback orientation be changed?
It tends to move with experience, particularly with accountability - people shift once they see a concrete case where acting on feedback paid off, or where ignoring it cost them. Asking for feedback you get to choose the source and timing of, rather than only receiving it when someone decides to give it, is one of the more reliable ways to build a more useful orientation.
Why do some people say they want feedback but never act on it?
Usually because utility and accountability are not the same thing and can sit at very different levels in the same person. Wanting feedback often comes from valuing the idea of improvement or wanting to look receptive; acting on it requires the separate, harder step of accepting that you personally are responsible for the change, which is where accountability comes in.
Sources
- Linderbaum, B. A., & Levy, P. E. (2010). The Development and Validation of the Feedback Orientation Scale (FOS). Journal of Management. doi:10.1177/0149206310373145
- London, M., & Smither, J. W. (2002). Feedback orientation, feedback culture, and the longitudinal performance management process. Human Resource Management Review. doi:10.1016/S1053-4822(01)00043-2
An honest note These items are Quinthea's own wording, adapted from the Feedback Orientation Scale, so your score is not comparable to any published norm. The scale asks what you believe and feel about feedback, not what you actually do when it arrives - self-report and real behaviour do not always match. It was developed and validated mainly in workplace settings, so results may translate less cleanly to feedback from a partner, a friend or a coach.