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Every Business School Professor has one or more students who are immensely gifted and talented but disengaged from the material and generally disruptive to the learning process. When such students graduate and enter the organizational world, they often become, what Mark Murphy1 identifies as, "talented terrors". Murphy (2006) describes these employees as having the skills but also as being "narcissistic, dramatic, whining and complaining." Can organizational slackers be indentified and transformed? Surprisingly, the description of organizational laziness is not new. Moral Philosophers in history named this toxic condition, acedia, the sin of not caring.
The term acedia was first coined by the
fourth-century Monastic Leader, Evagrius Ponticus
(345-399 A.D.). Evagrius described this condition
as one of organizational ennui, daily boredom, spiritual torpor, and work apathy. This is
more than mere laziness or the effects of some kind
of clinical depression. According to Evagrius, acedia in the worker "makes it seem that the sun
hardly moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty
hours long." Employees suffering from this kind
of apathy know what the right thing is to do, but simply do not care enough to be engaged with
the actual work and therefore the goals and
objectives of the organization. In time, acedia produces an organizational "death spiral" that ends in
severe depression in the employee. The British playwright and poet, Dorothy Sayers
(1944), described such a worker as one "who believes
in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know
nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing,
hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there
is nothing for which it will die." In the face of such
a grim picture, how can organizational leaders identify and remedy this "absence of care" in
their followers? The first step might be to
understand the different kinds of acedia in organizations.
In 1893, the eminent sociologist, Emile
Durkheim, introduced the concept of anomie.
Durkheim described anomie as a state of
psychological normlessness, a condition that he described
"in which norms have been erased". Acedia in the workplace, also described as "moral sloth",
not only demoralizes employees but leaves them in
a state of painful inability to participate in the ordinary operation and mission of
the organization. Applied to organizational
contexts, anomie and acedia often work together to erode
the very fabric of morality and work ethic of
workers. Robert Merton (1968), extending the insights
of Durkheim, proposed four kinds of "deviant adaptations" to the existence of normlessness
in organizations: (a) innovation; (b) ritualism;
(c) retreatism; and (d) rebellion. Andrew Crislip (2005), exploring the organizational
interaction between acedia and anomie, takes these
four descriptions further and proposes that these
four "deviant adaptations" of normlessness have
four different effects on the erosion of norms in the individual worker. |
