Destructive personality types that can ruin businesses

During a meeting with a Tanzanian entrepreneur two weeks ago, he complained about his microfinance company losing out to rivals due to “wafanyikazi wavinjari” (idle employees).

One may be excused for thinking the complaint is just his side of the story. But considering it has taken his blood, sweat and tears to get the company to its current level of success, one can also understand his concern that a bunch of loafers are determined to pull him down.

His predicament is not unique. It is shared by many founders of enterprise, whose eternal worry is if anybody, including their own flesh and blood, has what it takes to assimilate their vision and perspective with their kind of passion.

Sometimes it happens that a son, daughter or worker is the sort of successor the founder has in mind. When this happens, most owners of enterprise will confess it is their most magical moment.

Consolidate gains

However, since this is a rarity, all owners of enterprise will do everything within their power to consolidate their gains by distancing themselves from personalities that are damaging to business.

Starting with this week’s article, we shall focus on each of the three personality type’s owners of business or their managers worry about the most: social loafers, narcissists and hyper-emotional types.

The social loafer is an individual who puts in little effort at work. What is most dangerous about this character flaw is its uncanny ability to spread quickly, sap out the morale of productive employees and reduce an organisation’s effectiveness.

Social loafers’ main ticket to fame is their ability to influence others to withhold their effort by passively allowing conditions at work to deteriorate through a focus on non-work interests, such as spending an inordinate amount of time on the Internet.

As long as there is no ‘cost’ in terms of a sanction or reduced reward, the social loafer will always destroy under the cover of the crowd.

There are two types of this personality: the covert kind, who is the passive individual content withholding effort under the anonymity of a crowd; and the overt type, who is the activist who agitates others to reap maximum benefits by withholding effort at work.

While both these individuals are risky for enterprise, the overt types are by far the deadlier of the two. They appear open about their intentions, but their positions are just a mask for engendering a culture of loafing. They are what I’d call ‘chief evangelizers of the social loafing culture’.

Decreased effort

Social loafing manifests itself through decreased effort, increased absenteeism, decreased speed of work, intentionally steering clear of supervisors, taking more frequent and longer breaks than allowed, making deliberate mistakes and arriving at work late.

Bigger organizations are the perfect hiding places for such freeloaders. Government employment, with its complex web of departments and supervision, presents the perfect place for a social loafer to bloom and the loafing culture to blossom. Small wonder the Jubilee administration has not figured out the civil service conundrum.

Where social loafing has penetrated an organization to the point where it is no longer a definition reserved for individuals but is now a work culture, there is a likelihood that the following has occurred in the business: individual output cannot be evaluated, tasks are viewed as unimportant, and individuals’ contributions are unrewarded or unneeded.

One of the major difficulties owners of enterprise or their managers face in handling the elusive social loafing culture is diagnosis. The danger here is real — misunderstanding of the underlying causes will likely result in an inappropriate remedy.

Paying closer attention to how supervision is conducted, the job is designed, incentive systems are organised and employees are selected may help diagnose and eliminate the social loafing culture and the people propagating it.

The writer is a researcher on mental health.

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