By Jeremy Kingsley
Feb. 16, 2012
Lack of loyalty is a serious problem in organizations everywhere today. No longer do people join a company and devote the rest of their working lives to it. Companies are, of course, not exactly known for offering up 30 or 40 years of employment, a gold watch and pension plan.
Times have changed. Businesses appear and disappear at a dizzying pace. So do the jobs they offer. People no longer expect to spend their entire career with the same company.
Organizations preoccupied with short-term, bottom line thinking often view their employees as little more than resources to be hired, fired, and manipulated as the need arises.
Both sides pay a price for this lack of loyalty. Workers are naturally less happy on the job when they sense little or no loyalty from their employer. I agree with Carmine Coyote about how the negative impacts on productivity are truly alarming:
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People expect to be continually under threat of layoff, so they keep their resumes permanently on the market, changing jobs without concern for anything save their own short-term advantage.
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Because they see executives cheerfully raiding the corporate coffers to enrich themselves, any natural unwillingness to engage in cheating or manipulating rules to put extra money in their own pockets is lessened.
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Top level emphasis on quick, short-term returns (especially to themselves), permeates the organization as a whole, leading to everyone focusing on what will give them the biggest, quickest return—even if that means elbowing colleagues out of the way, playing the dirty politics, or hyping resumes to leverage a quick move somewhere else that is paying a few bucks more.
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Loyalty to colleagues can turn into an us-versus-them attitude toward those higher up.
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Worst of all, people feel devalued and see their work as less and less worthwhile. This creates emotional and psychological stresses and problems that go beyond the workplace and may last for some time.