A friend of mine works for a company that rolled out increased productivity standards last week that had to be put into place by this week. My friend showed me some emails he and his coworkers sent his managers asking questions about specifics on how to implement the new standards AND offering some solutions to some of the problems the company already knew would be hindrance to the rollout and hadn't solved yet. No one in the department is happy about the changes but everyone has accepted it's going to happen so the workers figured they'd offer these questions/ideas to make the rollout as smooth as possible for their own sakes.
My friend told me he and his coworkers were called into the manager's office on Monday to be told that their “negativity” about the productivity change was impacting department morale, they were being insubordinate, they couldn't expect management to figure it all out and they had to come up with solutions on their own (which, of course, they had already done). My friend said the meeting ended with the manager telling them the change was happening and they had to be more positive about it.
I guess asking questions about how to do something means workers are being negative?