Passive-aggressive is one of those “psychology words” people use a lot, but don’t really understand, and that’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because most workplaces have one or more employees and managers who are passive-aggressive.
When left unchecked it can destroy morale, sabotage productivity, create a hostile work environment and undermine authority. As disruptive behaviors go it’s the perfect crime – most small business owners aren’t familiar with it and are unable or unwilling to manage it. Therefore, it’s easy to get away with.
The behavior is, by design, sneaky and hard to recognize if you don’t know what to look for. It’s a deliberate, underground way of expressing anger at a person or organization. Passive-aggressive people often sabotage the business as a whole to express anger at the boss.
The employee feels their anger is justified, but they won’t address their concerns or dissatisfaction directly. Instead, someone “must pay” for their feelings of unhappiness and their behavior is intended to “get back” at someone, without others recognizing what’s happening. Passive-aggressive people work very hard at not being caught, and avoiding confrontation.
Some of the symptoms include: constantly not doing tasks they’ve agreed to do or are their job to do, regularly missing deadlines, withholding information, “stirring things up” to watch the fireworks, going over someone’s head or behind their back to make them appear incompetent, sabotaging other’s work, not taking responsibility for their actions/words, repeatedly blaming others.
Remember, they want to avoid direct, face-to face communication (passive), while still being able to act out their anger (aggressive). The rise of electronic devices and the ability to access other’s work has made it much easier for passive-aggressive people to do a lot of damage.
It gives them the ability to: write vague instructions and then accuse others of misunderstanding what they’ve written, claim important information has been sent when it hasn’t, appear busy (texting, emailing) without doing any real work, pass other’s work off as their own, throw off the team’s work with deliberate errors, blame others for poor communication skills.
Dealing with a passive-aggressive person feels like nailing Jell-O to the wall, they are slippery. They are very good at deflecting fault – the employee who has an excuse or explanation for everything, which usually includes blaming someone or something else. They are an expert in assuming the role of victim. But, ultimately, it’s the business who’s really the victim.
At Cogent Analytics, we never stop looking for ways to improve your business and neither should you. So, check out some of our other posts for helpful business information:
