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from the I-shouldn't-tell-you-this,-but dept.
Researchers from Simon Fraser University's Beedie School of Business have found that organizations implementing rules that govern confidential information (CI) can make it difficult for employees to fulfill their roles – resulting in rule breaking or bending.
Their paper, "Why and How Do Employees Break and Bend Confidential Information Protection Rules?" was co-authored by Dave Hannah, an associate professor in the Beedie School and Kirsten Robertson, an assistant professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, and published in the spring in the Journal of Management Studies.
The study examined two high-tech organizations that enforce CI protection rules. It found that these rules sometimes proved to be restrictive for employees, forcing them to choose between rule compliance and working efficiently.
Employees were often required to break the rules in order to carry out their jobs effectively, or bend them in ways that enabled them to meet some rule requirements.
"Many organizations rely on CI – the formula for Coca Cola, for example – which they must entrust to employees to allow them to do their jobs," says Hannah.
"Yet as soon as employees know this CI they become a potential vulnerability, forcing organizations to put in place rules to protect their CI that employees must follow."
The researchers found that by implementing CI rules they can create three types of tension among employees: obstruction tension, making it difficult for people to work; knowledge network tension, disrupting information flow in personal networks; and identity tension, where employees cannot fulfill the role with which they identify.
The study revealed that employees react to these types of tension by breaking or bending the rules in specific ways: shortcutting, circumventing rules that slowed work; conspiring, where they work together to get around rules; and selectively disclosing, where they allow external networks access to certain aspects of the CI.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 12 2015, @02:13PM
One of the standard union tactics against management is a "work-to-rule", where the union members all agree to follow the formally documented procedures of the company to the letter. The result more often than not is a massive slowdown in productivity as, for example, workers need to wait until exactly the right person has checked off the right inspection box in order to proceed to the next step in their process.
The reason this makes such a fantastic tactic is that when management tries to go after the union members, their response is "What is the problem? I'm doing exactly what you told me to do! It's all right here on form 27B-6!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2015, @05:38PM
That also explains government bureaucracy. All they understand is the rules and you best well follow your employer's rules to the letter when they also control the police.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @03:10AM
No, government bureaucracy comes directly from the lawmakers feeling they have to "do something" to save us all. Some moron uses their government charge card to buy $1000 in personal items and gets caught. This hit the local news and runs as a Major Scandal of government waste and abuse of YOUR tax dollars. Lawmakers to the rescue! The solution is to throw another layer of oversight on government purchases, now you need a second person to approve the purchase. When the purchased item comes in, you need an independent third party to sign the receipt, because the other two parties have a vested interest in wasting YOUR tax money. So now you've added two more forms that need to be signed off, to go with the three you needed to place the purchase. You've spent $10k to make sure that $1k won't be wasted.
You have some big program that is behind schedule and over budget. They're wasting YOUR tax money! Scandalous news stories about government inefficiencies. We'll convene review boards for oversight and make them spend a day or two a week preparing and defending their schedule and progress. Now you get to have daily meetings to talk about why you aren't getting any work done! Then these jackass lawmakers go out and run populist "outsider" campaigns talking about the problem is all the red tape. Guess where that red tape comes from? Bureaucrats don't create policies, they follow it. The fucknuts in the state and local and federal capitals are the ones who create it.
Whenever there is any kind of problem or "scandal", the solution is always to throw more people and oversight on the issue. More signatures and more forms required.