Chapter SevenPushing Back
The psychology of worker resistance
Early in the morning, on the last day of 2020, a former worker at a plant in Vitoria, Spain, that manufactures Mercedes automobiles stole a backhoe, drove 21 kilometers, and with the machine tore through plant security and began to violently and destructively stack the newly produced vehicles one atop the other.1 This was a kind of revenge for (one imagines) slights of various kinds experienced while employed. If he had been currently employed, it would have been classified as employee sabotage.
Sabotage carried out by employees to damage or destroy company property is what work psychologists term a “counterproductive work behavior.” There are limitless ...
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