Do you need approval/recognition from others?

[Mr Poltroon]

Of course I like being praised. I don't need it, but I want it. I also like helping people, and I'd like to think the latter does not come as a result of the former.

 

However, I don't need other people to feel my efforts were useful

[Mugi]

Need it? No, though I do appreciate it. I have really low self-esteem, so I generally assume I don't do well unless someone else says otherwise. I don't know why anyone would hate to be complimented though..

"You look really good today!"

"Bitch, shut up, I look good every day and I don't need you to tell me"

[TK8305]

It's nice when I get it but I don't expect it.  

[Fred the Barber]

I pretty much need to be praised, especially by the people I respect. While I am aware that I'm very good at my job, I nonetheless need to be fairly regularly told as much or my self-confidence starts to drain. And while I take constructive criticism well and act on it, I take anything stronger than that pretty harshly and get downcast about it easily.

[Mikado069]

 Long form:-

I think it's normal. Body language book suggested that we strive to have body contact with others, that's why we handshake or we don't like it when we pull our hand to handshake and The other person ignore it. Which make us social being by nature. And, you can measure it into deeper meaning by this, that, and that. Seeking of approval can be in different forms of meaning, take an example, there are people who stand to their own rules and never changes them for other people (e.g. friends) And, there are people who change them-self to suit other people (e.g. friends) rules. Types differ by the scale of that form, so some people might be unhealthy, which in turn either He/she doesn't have personality of his/her own or he/she become stubborn that won't try to change him/herself.

As for me, I don't like it when someone compliment of something I don't have, I get angry somehow. But, recently I fixed that, so I take it as joke instead of getting angry. However, I like it when someone I admire/respect praise me for something I have.

So, in conclusion, as long as it's balanced, it's normal.

If you want to get deeper in this topic, then you might want to try and read about cognitive functions theories.

 

Edited November 2, 2015 by Mikado069

[Salurian]

It depends on the person in question.

I do not give out recognition for people who I think have just... done what they are supposed to do.  I wouldn't expect praise for a mediocre job performance either.

If I tell you to do a job, and then you do a mediocre job of it and expect praise, you aren't going to get any.

If, however, I tell you to do a job and then you work hard and do a good job of it, I'll thank you/praise you for doing a good job.

You should be recognized and get approval for doing work above and beyond the norm.  You should not, however, get recognized for doing mediocre work that anyone else could do.  When I get praised for doing good work, or I give praise out, it should mean something.

But, that said, that doesn't mean that I'm necessarily doing the good work for the praise.  In my case, half the time I get praised at work these days is because I am lazy.

Let me give an example:

We handle cases for customers.  Each case has a string associated with it that has relevant information such as customer, case number, and other such fields.  We need to send email forms out with regards to these cases.  Recently because we had trouble sending to certain contacts, we developed a 'clean' form that was meant to get past spam and email blockers.  The only problem was, our mailer software could only generate the form, but we'd have to manually change the content in the email itself (replace CUSTOMERNAME with the actual customer name, for example).

This inevitably takes time copying and pasting all of this information, and increased our handling time for cases.

I am lazy, and I got tired of having to spend five minutes + to copy and paste these, so I wrote a quick script that would take the case string and generate the clean entire form off of it.  No fuss.  Took me maybe an hour or two to write.  You enter the string, hit a button, and a few seconds later voila.  Done.

Suddenly a 5 minute job becomes a 5 second job, my coworkers love me because it's far less of a pain to generate the form now, my bosses love me because my coworkers are handling the cases faster.

And while I'm enjoying the praise and whatnot, I'm also kinda going 'but I did that because I was lazy... oh well!'