I watched a video by HealthyGamerGG where he described employees as all walking around with "score cards" in their head which he illustrated with two rows of tick boxes: a "promotion" score and a "fired" score. It works like those free-sandwich punch cards.

He said work is stressful in part because we have imperfect information which one is ahead or nearing full, and as social animals we are always trying to model what the counterpart of that scorecard looks like in our boss's head without knowing for sure. I think it's particularly insightful HealthyGamerGG doesn't simplify this to a single +/- score, but rather drew two separate rows. I've definitely worked in jobs where I knew I ran a high balance in both categories.