Bad Apples Rot From the Head Down

Although we’ve discussed it here before, Pete over at Share Tactics has stumbled on one of the littler known aspects of customer satisfaction; that is, employee satisfaction. As the as the eyes, ears and (for better or worse) the voice of your organization, your employees are one of the single biggest factors contributing to the success or failure of your customer initiatives.

Recent research indicates that employee satisfaction does have a direct impact on customer satisfaction. For example, in The Ultimate Question, Reichheld correlates strong employee centric cultures to high net promoter scores. Additionally, new research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior suggests that a single negative employee can have a serious impact on the entire team. According one of the studies author’s, William Felps “group members will react to a negative member in one of three ways: motivational intervention, rejection or defensiveness.” If the first two strategies are successful, the problem is self-correcting. However, these resolutions require that the team feel and act empowered. Un-empowered teams can become “frustrated, distracted and defensive”. According to Felps:

Common defensive mechanisms employees use to cope with a bad apple include denial, social withdrawal, anger, anxiety and fear. As a result, trust in the team deteriorates and as the group loses its positive culture, members physically and psychologically disengage themselves from the team.

So, what you do about it when it occurs in your organization? For example, you have a REALLY smart employee (perhaps she is the only person who knows a particular section of code or is tight with a key customer), but she is a misanthropic pain-in-the-butt. No one wants to work with her, no one wants to manage her, no one wants to open their mouth when they are around her… what do you do? The authors suggest that you can try to isolate her from the rest of the team, but “you may have little alternative but to let [her] go”. This can be a tough decision, but you really need to balance out the risk of not doing anything. If left unchecked, there could be a serious and lasting impact on employee morale and, ultimately, customer satisfaction will suffer.

A word of caution though, the authors do warn that there is a difference between negative behavior and employees that constructively “rock the boat”. Is it really bad behavior, or do you not like what you see in the mirror that your “misanthropic pain-in-the-butt” employee is holding up to the organization? After all, that “bad apple” may have taken its cue from management.