Causes of Poor Performance in the Private Sector
From the book Handbook of Human Resource Management in the Middle East, by PawanBudhwar and KamelMellahi, HR managers reported that employees often have negative emotions attached to the process and build perceptions of unfairness because of its pure judgemental nature and their lack of trust in manager’s ability to evaluate objectively. This should be a concern for the organizations because ‘when employees have low quality performance, appraisal experiences, organizations will likely face lower job satisfaction and organizational commitment and higher intentions to quit.
Bashir, Alzebdeh and Al-Riyami (2014) stated that the most widely assumed reasons of the poor performance in the private sectors are lack of ability and bad work ethics. In reality, poor performance is not always and only caused by lack of ability and/or bad work ethics. The causes could be due to low motivation and lack of opportunities for learning and development within organizations. For example, a recent study on 51 randomly selected manufacturing organizations found that poor people management practices is the biggest obstacles towards productivity improvements programs followed by employee job dissatisfaction and poor HR management.
The book Grow a Pair: How to Stop Being a Victim and Take Back your Life (Larry Winget, 2013) specified that once you have taught your employees how to deliver on the expectations you have set for them, you have to be prepared to deliver the consequences when you don’t get what you expect. Sadly, we have become so fearful of being sued, few leaders and managers are willing to deliver the consequences that come with poor performance.
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“ Ok, let me say I’m extremely satisfy with the result while it was a last minute thing. I really enjoy the effort put in. ”
Bad employees with bad work habits and no work ethic run most businesses today. Many workers come to work late, put in just enough work to get by, and have little respect to their coworkers or management and even less respect to their customers. They figure that management and the HR department wouldn’t risk a lawsuit and they think they can get by with any type of poor behavior without consequences.
One key to successful management is to follow a consistent pattern of interaction with one’s team. According from the book of Peter Darling entitled SME Mining Engineering Handbook (2011), in most cultures, supervisors or managers with poor work ethics or sloppy or unsafe work practices tend to engender the same type of performance among their coworkers.
It’s been my experience that a person’s work ethic is revealed by any job they do. Bill Edwards indicated in the book Business Survival Made Simple that if poor character is part of the problem, public education must also take some of the blame for those who lack even the most basic of skills needed for a good job performance. The problem has become so great that some states no offer competency tests for first time job seekers in or just out of high school. Those who pass the tests are given a certification that they possess the skills needed to perform simple jobs or be farther trained by employers.
The book of Kevin T. Jackson entitled Building Reputational Capital: Strategies for Integrity and Fair Play (2004) point out that contextual factors have a strong impact on behavior, both good and bad. The Milgram experiments showed that people conform to expectations of authority figures. Many instances of business misdeeds stem from organizational factors like unrealistic controls, poor training, sloppy hiring practices and bad leadership. Organizational culture is a prime contributor to business prime on the other hand, the Tylenol decision at Johnson & Johnson shows that a firm’s ethos can lead to good behavior.
Renee Weisman mentioned in the book, “Winning in a Man’s World: Advice for Men and Women Who Wants to Succeed” (2008), managing poor performance is a critical aspect of leading and is every bit as important as rewarding and recognizing employees and teams. The latter is generally easy for women as they are natural team builders and cheerleaders, but the former can be more difficult. However, if someone is not pulling his or her weight, it drags the entire team down. People don’t understand why you are tolerating the poor performance and frankly wonder why they should continue to work so hard. When a women behaves like this, she is immediately labeled “too soft”. If you go into management, having some training in managing difficult people and giving bad news is imperative.
Angela Stinson revealed in her book, “Anxiety and Stress: How Poor Performance and Absenteeism Affect the Workplace” (2010) that medical data will be collected and analyzed to define stress and anxiety, distinguish common symptoms of stress and anxiety and identify available treatment plans. Occupational data will be collected and analyzed to develop a conclusion on how work performance is affected by stress and anxiety. By obtaining occupational data, they also hopes to develop an analysis on how these stressors can be avoided and/or treated to avoid future missed work days and poor performance.
Based from the study conducted by the Covenant University in Nigeria (2017), the goal of any organization is to have employees behave in a manner consistent with the company’s mission and goals i.e aligning absolutely with the core values, adhering to a code of ethics and matching actions with beliefs across a variety of situations. Meanwhile, integrity play a fundamental role in employee pattern of alignment, sound moral, ethical principles and organization productivity .Moreover, absenteeism, unwarranted breaks, stealing of organization property, converting office equipment for personal use, gossiping etc. are characteristics of unethical conducts and are liable to affect organization productivity .However, the organization level of productivity is directly proportional to employee level of commitment and satisfaction, thus, the commitment and satisfaction becomes immaterial if it does not infused with integrity. Integrating values of integrity into the day-to-day operation of an organization will promote employees ethical behavior, prevent damaging lapses while tapping into human instincts for moral though/action and as well enhanced sustained productivity.
A study from Lithuanian University addresses that employees working in public sector face ethic and working culture problems. Public officers meet various ethical problems at their work. One of them is created by themselves, the others occur in communication with other customers. When having some contact with the employees at municipality, people judge the morality and working culture of higher officers and public institution according to their behavior. Therefore ethic and working culture of municipality employees should be as high as possible. Ethic is important not only in communication with customers, it’s important also internally in the organization, in the mutual relations between colleagues and staff members.
As stated by Jacqueline Karen Kott in her research about ‘The Role of Ethics in Employee Behavior’ (2012) the terms “moral” and “ethical” are often used interchangeably in society, although it is important to understand the difference between these concepts. While morality involves an individual’s personal belief system, ethics are more so comprised of society’s expectations of acceptable behavior. Norms of acceptable ethical behavior are naturally formed in social environments including work situations. In these certain environments, individuals tend to adhere to these set standards of conduct and act in a similar way to their surrounding population.Ethical relativists reevaluate their own individual ethical beliefs each time a decision is made, instead of accepting the ethical norms of the present situation. Taking these ideas into consideration, the present study views how ethical norms can influence employee behavior in an organizational environment.
According to the case study of Nombuso AntoniaHlengane entitled ‘Evaluation of Employee Poor Work Performance with Specific Focus on Operational Functions at Cambridge Police Station in the Eastern Cape Province’ (2013), understanding the impact of employee poor performance and dealing with it immediately is very important to curb the negative element in the organization especially if left unattended.Poor performance has negative consequences in the organization and also to the image of members. It also transpired from the respondents that poor performance should be addressed with immediate effect hence if it is not dealt with it has bad consequences.Poor work performance tarnishes the image of the organization and runs the work place unruly and demotivate members that are hard workers.
As mentioned by Brent Keijzer in his study ‘Employee Motivation Related to Employee Performance in the Organization’, The relationship between employee motivation and job performance has been studied in the past (Vroom, 1964). But high correlations between the two were not established. However, later research concluded that employee motivation and job performance are indeed positively correlated (Petty et al., 1984). This relationship is studied in this thesis and the aim is to provide managers useful information how employees’ performances can be increased by motivating them intrinsically and/or extrinsically.
As indicated by Opu Stella in her research entitled ‘Motivation and Work Performance: Complexities in Achieving Good Performance Outcomes; A Study Focusing on Motivation Measures and Improving Workers Performance in Kitgum District Local Government’ which stated that the notions of motivation and work performance have become a popular driving force behind most successful organizations.It is widely recognized in the human resource literature that promotion of the motivation of workers in both private and public organizations leads to a higher quality of human resources and optimum performance. Consensus is also growing among managers about the significance of combining good human resource performance approaches on motivation incentives to encourage good performance. As the organization seeks to improve its workers performance severe challenges exist to achieve the overall objective of the organization to extend adequate motivational incentives to its entire population.
As studied by Margaret Basaza in her research ‘Factors Affecting the Performance of Employees at The Ministry of Health Headquarters in Kampala, Uganda, she stated that good performance by staff is enabled via a supportive working environment. This encompasses more than just having sufficient equipment and supplies. It also includes systems issues, such as decision-making and information-exchange processes, and capacity issues such as workload, support services and infrastructure (Potter &Brough, 2004).Understanding motivation and performance begins with understanding that the workers are not necessarily to be blamed if their performance is not what the supervisor envisions. Instead of assuming that the workers in question are lazy or unskilled or unwilling to perform the task at hand, the wise manager seeks to understand why the workers are not performing to their expectations. While it may be that the workers do not possess the required skills (which can be remedied through training), there may be other factors involved which are more complicated and which reach to the heart of effective management. Assuming that the workers are being willfully disobedient or unproductive is to put responsibility where it does not belong (McGregor, 1985)
Marie Strebler stated in her research entitled as ‘Managing and Responding to Poor Employee Performance’ (2011) that poor performance is an issue that worries managers and employees alike. It is of concern to senior managers because it is a measure of how effectively the organization is led. But people in the organizations do not feel their organization tackles poor performance appropriately. Dealing with poor performance is an emotive issue. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that many organizations fail to address it.
Causes of Poor Performance in the Private Sector. (2022, Apr 14). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/causes-of-poor-performance-in-the-private-sector/
