The Passive-Aggressive Organization

According to research described in “How Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel (1)”, the worst team member’s performance is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn’t matter how great the best member of a team performs or how efficient the leader of a group.  Teams perform at or near the level of their weakest member.

If full group engagement or team cooperation is expected, then the person with more difficulty cooperating with others will slow group performance. Teams overwhelmingly perform as their members behave.  Even one bad apple can not only spoil, but destroy the barrel.

Passive-aggressive coworkers are the most frustrating and obnoxious people in any workplace

The worst case of passive-aggressive behavior involves destructive attitudes such as negativity, sullenness, resentment, procrastination, “forgetting” to do something, chronic lateness, and intentional inefficiency.

When it involves promising to do tasks others rely on — purposefully not getting them done and offering lame excuses later then portray their behavior as non intentional – it’s exasperating for the manager.  Time, energy, effort, opportunity, and sometime money is lost.

In cases where some work is actually done, it may be delivered too late to be useful (e.g., “You needed this for the meeting at nine? I thought you said for the meeting at noon!”), may be performed in a way that makes it useless (e.g., “You wanted the stats for ‘06? I thought you said the stats for ‘96!”), or it may be sabotaged in any number of other ways.

This creates a paranoid team or workgroup environment — workers need to be always on the look-out for “backstabbing behavior,” so they can defend themselves and preserve the quality of their own work.

NDMC as I see it as a passive-aggressive organization. Passive in terms of financial matters. As what I had stated that we are still on the process of ongoing transformation. The president asked the help of the new VP for Finance. As the VP for Finance is doing its job to elevate the financial status, of course, there are programs and sometimes budget that is not approved. This comes in now another problem. As a certain budgetary need is not approve.  The effect of this to the requesting party of course, they tend to be passive next time they have an activity that needs budgetary requirement they just postponed the activity.

Aggressive because of the strong drive of the president for university status of the college. He is somehow implementing new policies and guidelines in terms of upgrading instructions as well as the facilities to cope up with the requirements of the approving body.