MZMORALE ZEROthe antithesis of employee engagement
DIRECTIVE 127 / CONTROL

MAKE THE JOB HARDER THAN THE WORK

Require employees to overcome the organization before doing the job.

Leave essential information in scattered folders, keep tools incompatible, and require approvals from unavailable managers. Praise employees who invent workarounds. When output suffers, ask why they struggle with execution.

THE MECHANISM

Organizational obstacles converted into supposed deficiencies in individual performance.

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.
THE UNFORTUNATE PART

Evidence, with limitations.

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.

Scientific boundary: Organizational constraints are distinct from inherent task difficulty; their associations with strain do not prove every administrative step is wasteful.

Sources

These references offer context, not a completed review or a test of this instruction.

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