In this Newsweek NurtureShock post, Po Bronson references an experiment by Stanford researcher Carol Dweck - the pioneer of looking at students' views of achievement vs. learning.
Bronson effortlessly summarizes a complex set of experiments by Dweck and co-researcher Jennifer Mangels, and you should read the entire post, but the major point was this: "knowledge-hungry" (in Bronson's terminology) students learned better from their mistakes than "grade-hungry" students. Knowledge-hungry students were interested in where they had made mistakes so they could learn the correct answer. Grade-hungry students were more concerned simply that they had made a mistake - the error itself obsessed them, not what they didn't know. As a result, knowledge-hungry students did better on a retest: they learned better.
Even when we leave school and enter the work world, we often remain "grade-hungry." Companies, frankly, enable and reward this focus with their HR management tools: promotions, numerical performance reviews, "merit" raises. Workers tend to be more concerned about the effect a mistake will have on these measures than on learning from what they did. This is bad for the company, of course. And bad for the worker.
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