MZMORALE ZEROthe antithesis of employee engagement
DIRECTIVE 087 / CONTROL

MAKE THE JOB HARDER THAN THE WORK

Employees should overcome the organization before they begin overcoming the task.

Allow missing information, incompatible procedures, poor tools, interruptions and unavailable resources to remain distributed across the system. Each obstacle is manageable in isolation. The employee's job is to assemble enough local workarounds that the actual work can eventually begin.

Primary: CONTROLFEEDBACKMEANING
RATIONALE
Organizational constraints are rarely owned by the same unit, which allows their combined cost to remain organizationally anonymous.
SUCCESS INDICATOR
Employees spend enough effort navigating the environment that completing the core task feels comparatively straightforward.
COMMON FAILURE
Treating organizational constraints as job demands and removing avoidable barriers in tools, information, procedures and resources rather than compensating with individual effort.
STATUS
Canonical / approved

Reconstructed Handbook series.

THE UNFORTUNATE PART

Unfortunately, the research…

Claim

Organizational constraints are recognized work stressors and are associated with impaired job performance alongside other demand stressors, although the strength of relationships varies by stressor and occupation.

Evidence

A meta-analysis of work-demand stressors and performance found that organizational constraints, role ambiguity, role conflict, workload and related stressors have measurable relationships with job performance and that moderators matter.

Strength: Strong

Sources

The Directive is satire. The research summary is not. Evidence is stated separately and qualified to the underlying literature rather than treated as proof of the joke.

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