Question

Not looking for a book answer, looking for personal experience.

Have you ever experienced fear in the workplace? What impact did it have on your performance? Is a little bit of fear a good thing for motivating performance? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Yes i experienced fear in work place when i was working in procurement department and handling imports for upcoming project. Main machinery is imported from all around the world such as Germany, India and China. Transit time and import formalities are different and lengthy. To meet the dead lines to start the project means that every department had to perform very efficiently and timely. In last phase, it created the fear among the project teams to meet the deadlines which result is following:

1. Stress: Employees who deal with fear often feels stress about their job status which is unknown and not predictable to them. Stressful situation often cause employee in action of:

Absence
Possible safety concerns
Lowered performance
2. Resistance: When employees are in fear and don’t get positive feedback from their seniors, which result in response with resistance. These result in:

Reduce productivity
Lack of participation
Isolation
Unwillingness to change
3. Uncertainty: When employees feel fear at workplace, they are uncertain of:

Fear of job loss
Reduced incentives
Pay cuts
Layoffs
4. Silence: Fear can led to silence, which force employee in resisting to express their views, option to managers and other superiors.

Fear motivation is cantered around creating results of certain actions known to the employees. This type of motivation is last tool used by management when it fails to work of incentive motivation. In business, theory of motivation, in which Carrot and stick model is used. Carrot is incentive motivation and fear is stick motivation. In such type of motivation, management let employees known to their certain action with negative results.