What causes employee negativity?

In 2003, global professional services firm Towers Perrin conducted a survey of some U.S. and Canadian companies that identified five elements that largely generate most of the current negativity among their workers. The five elements are:

* An excessive workload
* Concerns about management’s ability to lead the company successfully
* Anxiety about the future security of their job, income and retirement
* Boredom and lack of challenge in their work, intensifying their frustration with their workload
* Insufficient recognition for the level of contribution and effort they provide and concerns that pay isn’t commensurate with performance.

Interestingly, when asked, senior HR executives of the same companies admitted to being aware of employee negativity, but cited different reasons for it. Specifically, according to the study, they "underestimated employees’ need to feel connected to and competent in their work, their desire to build competencies and their wish for recognition."

Let's take a poll among the TechRepublic audience. If you had to rate which of the above elements MOST causes negativity in yourself, which would it be?

The dumb things organizations do to mess up team building

I ran across an article the other day on about.com, written by Human Resources specialist Susan M. Heathfield. In the article, Heathfield cites 20 dumb things that organizations can do to screw up their relationship with the people who work for them. Here are a couple of my personal "favorites." I've seen these things seriously impair employee relations and foster a great deal of negativity among staffers. My comments are in parentheses.

* Appraise the performance of individuals and provide bonuses for the performance of individuals and complain that you can't get your staff working as a team. (I personally know of no organization whose employees operate independently of each other. Any employee's success is almost always dependent on the good work of a fellow employee.)
* Ask people for their opinions, ideas, and continuous improvement suggestions, and fail to implement their suggestions or empower them to do so. Better? Don’t even provide feedback about whether the idea was considered. (Never underestimate employees' abilities to know they are being patronized.)
* Make up new rules for everyone to follow as a means to address the failings of a few. (Ever heard the expression about one bad apple spoiling the whole barrel?)
* Make a decision and then ask people for their input as if their feedback mattered. (How infuriating is it to be asked how you like a decision when there is absolutely nothing you can do or say to reverse it? It's less insulting to just not be asked at all.)