How can you address passive-aggressive behavior in the workplace?

Passive-aggressive behavior, especially in the form of gossip, is cancer to the culture of an organization. If permitted to metastasize, it will become very difficult to reverse.

During my past 20 years of working life in Australia I have come across all kinds of negative behaviour from working staff / managers. 1stly we all know that negativity feeds more negativity. Imagine you having a dreadful day with your manager who behaved aggressively with you. This negative impact does not stop within the bounds of your work environment, but it has a contagious effect and is likely to spread more negativity among friends and family. So one must keep in mind that passive-aggressive behaviour can do a lot of unseen damage within a society. Imagine a angry employee who could indulge in crime that can kill many people. We all have read about this in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

This is probably one of the hardest behaviors to recognize especially if you do not know the person very well, have been at a job a short while, or haven’t interacted with the team or employees very long. And the reason I say that is because: true passive aggressive behavior is hidden behind non truths and deception. This where you have to pay attention to what people do vs what people say. A passive aggressive will never tell you they are dissatisfied or upset. They continually say that nothing is wrong and that everything is okay. The problem is the aggressive part. Not doing what they say they will do, saying things behind someone’s back, and being destructive towards the company, the team, and the mission;It will tear a team apart

Trust your instincts. As a leader, we must be careful to balance instincts with facts. However, when it comes to passive-aggressive behaviors, instinct can be critical to identification. Some examples... 1. When someone says they're not angry but they seem so to you 2. When someone says they don't talk about other behind their back but quickly get quiet when others enter the room 3. Says they are over something but keep mentioning it

Following are ways and means of how passive aggressive behaviour perpetuates. Below are the tactics used by managers/staff. 1. Not being constructive with your peers. Not providing constructive suggestion/guidance/solution within a team. In other words, always being a strong critic without contributing any value to your day-to-day work (BAU/Project). 2. Not responding to people’s email. Maintaining silence and not showing any level of co-operation to any joint initiatives. 3. Not being friendly and only indulge in a formal manner and maintain distance. 4. Not showing recognition or any kind of appreciation to the work in any way.

- "I prefer not to speak of others when they are not present." - "I prefer to focus on the positives rather than negatives." - "I'm not sure this discussion is helping us make progress on the issue."

We usually fail to look at ourselves in the mirror to realize our behaviour and correct ourselves. Plus, there are only very few people who openly encourage personal feedback. Not sure how many companies have created a good platform for self-change and personal improvement for their employees and have shown some degree of success to tackle bad behaviour. The biggest safety net for this kind of psychopathic managers is, they think that affected employee will not go beyond his or her level to report to higher authorities about their aggressive behaviour and hence they can easily get away with it. So, they exploit this weakness to their advantage and continue doing the same. To address this above issue we require a bottom-up reporting

How do we overcome this problem which is widely prevalent within a large organisation or corporate environment? There is no easy solution to fix this problem. Eliminating this problem is going to be a long-term solution. 1. Corporate culture/governance should take this issue very seriously to weed out bad behaviour. 2. Organisation structure must be flat or there must be a strategy to avoid hierarchy and unnecessary bureaucracy at any cost. Having hierarchy does contribute to this issue. 3. Every employee must be provided with an easy platform to raise a complaint without facing any negative consequences. 4. Complaint must be scrutinised, and strongest action taken on person(s) who have shown bad behaviour regardless of their position.

There could be a number of reasons an individual has been manifesting passive-aggressive behavior. As a servant leader faced with this type of behavior in the past, I struggled to know how to handle it. I had a direct report who would only do exactly what was articulated, nothing more nor less, and then if things did not go well the person would shrug shoulders and say, "That's what you instructed me to do." During my struggles during this time, I began to be curious about this person, what earlier experiences they had gone through and how those experiences had shaped them. I began to see that, while I could not alter their choices, I could provide a clear path to helping them successfully accomplish the vision we shared on our team.

The Acronym Model of SERVANT Leadership? condensed dozens of servant leadership models and found the 7 core principles, across all great models, are (SERVANT): - Selflessness - Empathy - Resolve - Virtuousness - Authenticity - Nonpartisanship - Thoroughness There's no room for passive-aggressiveness among these principles. Whether you work with the team member on being nonpartisan, virtuous, authentic, or empathetic, you will work with them on principles that inhibit the bad behaviors.