Read an extract from an article below about incompetent employees. For each question 15 – 20, choose the correct answer.
Every organisation has its share of employees-from-hell: the lazy, deluded, hypochondriac under-performers. They are difficult to manage and miserable to work with. Their productivity is low and their ability to poison staff morale high. They are, alas, always well-entrenched and management-resistant. Interestingly, their numbers in any organisation have more to do with management's refusal to deal with the situation rather than with poor selection. That is, their existence in the organisation is nearly always due to a long line of weak managers who have declined to tackle the problem.
Traditionally, there are three classic ineffective ways of dealing with the incompetent. The first is to ignore the problem, hoping that it will go away. Rather than confront laziness or serious absenteeism, the manager gives the employee less work to do. This inevitably leads to frustration on the part of the good hardworking staff who see the problem employee getting away with it.
The second approach, which has traditionally been the most favoured, is to pass them on. There is usually a part of any business where people believe the poor performer can do no damage. Alternatively, poor performers can be moved to another branch in the dreariest part of town, or to another town, or even to another country. A clever variant of this tactic is to herd all the incompetent employees into one part of the company that is then sold off or privatised.
There is a third approach which is to promote the incompetent. This sounds bizarre and exceedingly stupid but is not infrequently adopted. The idea is that, although these posts are quite senior and well-paid, the actual jobs are fairly pointless ones in which incompetent people can hide without doing any serious damage. The employee is thus confirmed in his or her delusions of competence.
All three of these strategies are the result of not dealing with the problem early on. Many managers find dealing with incompetence very difficult. The scenario that all managers hate is as follows: show a subordinate a low mark on their appraisal form. The employee first wants the behaviour defined; then wants an example of when this behaviour occurred; then argues about how this incident occurred and how typical it was. The net result is a row about the past and frustration on the part of both.
A different and more successful method is the problem-solving approach. This insists that one still shows the low score but, rather than attempting to explain it, one describes what needs to be done differently to achieve a higher score. The emphasis is on the future not the past; on a clear description of the desirable behaviour, not the incompetent behaviour. The touchy or sensitive employee normally responds to this reasonably well. Nevertheless, there are those who cannot, or will not, respond to good management. They may be unable to do the job due to not having the ability to learn ever-changing tasks fast enough. They may be distracted by problems at home or more likely they have been managed very poorly in the past.
There is really only a very limited number of things that can be done with the really incompetent. Buy them out, which may be the best solution for all concerned; raise the game by making sure they are given ever higher but reachable targets. A final strategy is to insist that they have an annual psychological test where a disinterested outside consultant does a motivation analysis and has the power to recommend that they be let go – not encouraged to go to another part of the organisation, but into the bracing waters of the job market.
What criticism does the writer make of managers in the first paragraph?
What is the effect of the first of the methods suggested for dealing with incompetent staff?
In both the second and third ineffective methods of dealing with incompetent employees, the managers' aim is to
The writer says in the fifth paragraph that employees who are given a low mark on their appraisal form will
In the sixth paragraph the writer says that when talking to an incompetent employee a manager should
What does the writer suggest as a way to deal with incompetent employees who fail to respond even to a problem-solving approach?