Employee Sabotage: A Random or Preventable Phenomenon?

"I'll tell you what you can do," Mr. Watson said confidentially, leaning over the bar and handing Jones the beer. The other man at the bar bent toward them to listen; he had been silently following their conversation for several minutes. "You try a little sabotage. That's the only way you fight that kinda trap." "Wha you mean 'sabotage'?" "You know, man," Mr. Watson whispered. "Like the maid ain bein paid enough to throw too much pepper in the soup by accident. Like the parkin lot attendant takin too much crap skid on some oil and crash a car into the fence." "Whoa!" Jones said. "Like the boy workin in the supermarket suddenly get slippery fingers and drop a dozen aigs on the floor cause he ain been pay overtime. Hey!" "Now you got it" (Toole, 1980: 143-144). When contrasted to what one silent, seemingly contented employee at a computer can do, the acts of sabotage suggested by the characters in John Kennedy Toole's New Orleans-based novel are pretty tame. While many quiet and undramatic acts of sabotage occur every day, there are those which are surprising for their daring, creativity, and potential impact on employers, customers and co-workers. Many of those acts take advantage of the technology-dependent nature of the modern workplace, and the increasing sophistication of the products manufactured there. Confidential information can be accessed, altered, destroyed, stolen, or distributed with a few key strokes. Component parts can be sabotaged, causing complex and expensive products to be compromised or to fail outright. Food and drug contamination has been made easier by the high volume production and distribution techniques characteristic of processed and prepackaged foods and drugs (Groves and Wright, 1989). Some rather simple acts can potentially cost a company millions of dollars in lost business, rework, damaged machinery, and liability. HP Foods was forced to remove cans of baked beans from super market shelves after they were discovered to have slivers of glass in them. The subsequent investigation revealed that the glass had been deliberately added by either an employee or a visitor to the factory (Withington, 1990). A Boeing Co. 737-400 twin-engine jet-liner in the final stages of production was discovered to have "highly irregular" wire cuts buried inside a thick bundle of wires feeding a power system. Boeing suspected the wires may have been cut by an employee. . . . "Everybody on site is an employee. So that would be a conclusion that one could draw" (The Wall Street Journal, April 4, 1990). After reviewing published accounts in the popular, professional, and academic literature and numerous interviews with business and security firm executives(1), a number of overlapping general motivations emerge as likely explanations for most acts of employee sabotage. Knowledge of these motivations and of the various acts themselves should improve our ability to minimize both their likelihood and their potential impact (Crino and Leap, 1989). This presentation will create a working definition of employee sabotage and will discuss the motivations which seem common to those behaviors. It will also make recommendations on how to reduce the likelihood of employee sabotage and how to limit the effects of sabotage that may occur. The range of sabotage activities is wide, encompassing everything from stopped-up toilets (Guenther and Lipman, 1987), to compromising the safety of the space shuttle (The Wall Street Journal, August 29, 1988). For example, undergraduate business students generated a list of 51 different methods of sabotage when asked to do so for a research study (Giacolone and Knouse, 1990). As varied as sabotage behaviors may be, they share some common elements: all of them constitute deliberate interference with normal company activities and relationships, and each is characterized by prior thought and appreciation of likely consequences.(2) The intention is to damage, disrupt or subvert the organization's operations for the personal purposes of the saboteur by creating unfavorable publicity, embarrassment, delays in production, damage to property, the destruction of working relationships, or the harming of employees or customers. …