Managing Human Resources, Eight Edition

Disciplining Employees

Employee discipline is a tool that managers rely on to communicate to employees that they need to change a behavior. For example, some employees are habitually late to work, ignore safety procedures, neglect the details required for their job, act rudely to customers, or engage in unprofessional conduct with coworkers. Employee discipline entails communicating the unacceptability of such behavior along with a warning that specific actions will follow if the employee does not change the behavior.85

Employee discipline is usually performed by supervisors, but in self-managed work teams employee discipline may be a team responsibility. For instance, at Hannaford Bros., a food distribution center outside Albany, New York, ...