The Art of Demotivation
A Visionary Guide To Transforming Your Company’s Least Valuable Asset: Your Employees
Number of pages: 242
Publisher: Despair
BBB Library: Leadership, Operations Management
ISBN: 9781892503404
Editorial Review
In the early 1960s, Douglas McGregor defined contrasting assumptions about the nature of humans in the workplace. These assumptions are the basis of Theory X and Theory Y teachings. Theory X assumes that people are lazy and will avoid work whenever possible. Theory Y, on the other hand, assumes that people are creative and enjoy work. Theory X holds the belief that people do not like work and that some kind of control must be exerted to get them to work effectively. These people require a rigidly managed environment, adding threats of disciplinary action as a primary source of motivation. It is also held that employees will only respond to monetary rewards as an incentive to perform above the level of that which is expected. In this radical book¾The Art of Demotivation¾a new version of Theory X is adopted to reflect the frustration caused by unproductive staff and the reaction of managers who don’t believe in motivation. It is an old theory, but still finds its advocates in the workplace of the 21st century. The book seems to echo Theory X, and even adds further disciplinary measures and logistics which are called “disconfirmation”, “indifference” and many more. These measures ¾ according to the author¾should be used to give a halt to arrogant employees and spur lazy ones to enforce productivity. Otherwise they are laid off to mitigate their negative effect on the organization. Whether we agree or disagree with the author, we believe that our readers have the right to read and heed this strange book.
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Wisdom to Share
Employees are the root of the problem why companies can go sour. Executives know this, intuitively, but have been brainwashed over the past decades to believe that with enough motivation and expenditure, their employees will be the productive beings that they were meant to be, when, in fact, they are the reasons of failure.
Employees lack maturity: Childlike behavior is vivid in corporations with such behavior as blaming one another, doing things they know will not work, avoiding effort and confusing together the terms “activity” and “productivity”.
Employees exploit their employer’s generosity: while executives often use incentive plans to get their employees to do what they are originally hired for, employees, frequently engage in fraud and deception to exploit these plans and programs.
There seems to be many benefits for applying Radical Demotivation. When the employee feels powerless, they will definitely be satisfied with less.
For the demotivation process to work out, executives must start out with a set of core values to be genuinely lived out. The less power an employee has, the more they will be required to execute on the company’s core values.
Stories reveal a victim—the employee, and the exploiter—the executive and/or the company. In RD storytelling, the idea is to reverse these roles, portraying the employee as the exploiter and the executive as the victim.
Never share personal information with employees. Every time you do this, you venture into an unwanted territory of having an employee “connecting” to you or feeling similar to you.
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