Journal of
Management
Development
14,7
48
Workplace sabotage: its
styles, motives and
management
F. Analoui
University of Bradford, Bradford, UK
The history of industrialization is rich with accounts of “unconventional
practices”[1] such as sabotage, absenteeism and low productivity. Nowadays,
there is a growing recognition among practitioners in industry that workplace
practices such as “doubling up”, “cutting corners”[2], “getting even with
others”[3], as well as more serious practices such as sabotage[4,5], constitute
common unofficial, illegal and often covert features of organizational life.
Despite their reportedly common occurrences, they constitute the dark side of
the organizational life, one which is relatively ignored and is least investigated
or understood[6].
Many managers and practitioners in industry who subscribe strongly to the
unitary frames of reference or the values and ideals of neo-human relations,
would rather ignore the occurrence of acts of deviance[7], destruction[8] and
misbehaviour[9], and often resort to a “grin and bear it” attitude, in the hope
that these practices will ultimately fade away – but they never do[3, p. 3].
Though much water has passed under the bridge since the introduction of
pluralistic frames of reference[10], and of power dependencies and political
behaviour at work[11], managers still find it easier to dismiss sabotage at the
workplace as an act of madness, as a crime or as immoral practice instead of
acknowledging the existence of such, perhaps, reactionary behaviour as
expressions of discontent at work[2,12,13]. The corporate managerial stand and
chauvinism of the 1980s and 1990s has found such practices still prevalent but
difficult to manage – maybe because the reasons for their occurrence are not
understood.
This article poses a three-dimensional view of sabotage and thus views these
organizational behaviours as unconventional practices used primarily to
express discontent in the workplace. On the basis of the empirical results of
participant observation research, different dimensions of the unconventional
practices, the forms which these behaviours take, the behavioural strategies
(styles) adopted by saboteurs, and the meaning and motives attributed to them
in context of work relationships, will be discussed. In doing so, the emphasis
will be placed on the acts of destruction (workplace sabotage), how and why
This study formed part of a research thesis which was conducted at Cranfield School of
Management, under the supervision of Professor Andrew Kakabadse.
Journal of Management
Development, Vol. 14 No. 7, 1995,
pp. 48-65. © MCB University Press,
0262-1711