8 ways to ruin your employees’ motivation
A new study offers great ways to ‘utterly destroy an employee’s work life.’ Of course, you could simply take this as a cautionary tale, and avoid these tactics.
She enlisted her staff to spy on one another, recalls Brenda Della Casa, managing editor of I Am Staggered, USA and author of “Cinderella Was a Liar.”
“She’d then use the information—accurate or not—against the employee and as an excuse to go off on the employee and create a culture of fear,” Della Casa says.
Sure, lots of bosses work hard to motivate workers. But what are the best practices for leaders seeking to “completely, utterly destroy an employee’s work life,” in the words of a recent Washington Post article?
In that article, researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer tell how they collected confidential electronic diaries from 238 professionals in seven companies over several months. They compared the best days with the worst and came up with a how-to for bosses seeking to turn eager hires into dispirited underperformers.
Among their suggestions were, “Never allow pride of accomplishment,” and, “Miss no opportunity to block progress on employees’ projects.”
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