Puppet In The Workplace

Employees sometimes feel themselves to be in a position where they feel they are being dominated and controlled negatively by the other person in workplace. A very common example of the above negative relation in workplace environment, is when a line manger gets angry with the employees to uplift their performance and manages to make them react and get upset, he actually manage to dominate them.

Over a period of time the line manger start realizing that he possess an invisible and powerful remote control, using which, whenever he want to manage the employees’ performance, what he should do is to get angry with them and that way they will achieve the desired result. His anger becomes a remote control when employees react they are allowing this control or allowing the other’s remote control to work. It is actually them that chooses to allow to be influenced and dominated. It is important for employees to realize that they can choose and take the decision to allow themselves to be controlled and dominated, or they can choose to express what we feel without being affected by the reaction of the other and still maintaining the respect and good relation with the line manager.

As Human Resource practitioners, let us not allow this type of culture to take place, to let the employees be dominated and influenced by external entities which includes business objectives and people or we will lose the high performance organisation culture. Each moment employees allow another person’s remote control to work successfully or allow an objectives to control and dominate their emotional state, they are weaken internally and become like a puppet in the other person’s hands. A puppet is never powerful to achieve the organisation business objectives because it does not act on its own but is controlled by someone else. We need to prevent this happen, if we want to promote healthy workplace environment.