Dr. Ruth Oji
Imagine this scenario: a senior manager publicly interrogates a junior employee about a minor reporting error. “Did you even think before submitting this?” he asked, voice dripping with contempt, as colleagues shifted uncomfortably in their seats. “What exactly goes through your mind when you do such sloppy work?” The employee, visibly shaken, mumbled an apology. The manager continued for another three minutes, dissecting not just the error but seemingly the employee’s entire competence and worth. By the end, the room felt smaller, the air heavier. The error was corrected. The damage, however, was done.
This scene plays out in offices, hospitals, factories, and boardrooms across the country every single day. We’ve normalized a workplace culture where “giving feedback” has become a euphemism for public humiliation, where “addressing queries” means interrogating employees like hostile witnesses, and where senior staff wield their authority like a weapon rather than a responsibility. We call it accountability. We call it maintaining standards. What we rarely call it is what it actually is: a failure of leadership wrapped in institutional power.
The prevalence of condescending, disrespectful feedback in workplaces is staggering. Employees routinely report being spoken to in ways they would never tolerate outside professional settings—belittled in meetings, subjected to sarcasm disguised as humor, questioned in tones that presume incompetence rather than seek understanding. The psychological toll is measurable: increased stress, anxiety, diminished self-confidence, and a constant state of hypervigilance that exhausts mental resources. Professionally, the damage manifests as decreased creativity, reluctance to take initiative, and a culture of covering mistakes rather than learning from them.
