In February, our (almost) regular guest blogger Ioanna Lazarov wrote an article about how to deal with office slackers. Io approached the issue from a peer’s perspective. This time we’ll approach it from a manager’s point of view.
In Douglas McGregor’s theories of motivation, slackers can definitely be placed under the X-theory: individuals inherently lazy that will avoid work if they can and that they inherently dislike work.
One pitfall of McGregor’s X theory is that it assumes people as lazy, killing any possibility of rehabilitation. Clearly, the author’s definition of an X can not be taken literally since we know that there are shades of gray in the spectrum of human behavior and personality variations.
If you have a rotten apple in your team, these are 6 things you can try to increase his or her productivity:
