Caught misbehaving at work!

A bus driver has been suspended after a passenger filmed him apparently reading while driving along a dual carriageway in Birmingham.

The passenger, who wishes to remain anonymous, filmed the National Express West Midlands driver steering with his elbows while holding a small book.

They said they took the footage after getting on the number 61 bus at Selly Oak at 2005 BST on Monday.

See Bus driver filmed reading while driving in Birmingham (BBC News) for more details - and an interesting video.

Facebook misbehaviour

Staff at shops owned by the Dixons Stores Group have been caught insulting customers on a social networking site.

An unofficial group, set up on Facebook for staff of DSG, featured comments from existing and former staff of the electronics retailer.

For more details see Gadget shoppers branded 'stupid' (BBC News: Technology).

4 per cent of working time 'lost' to Internet surfing

According to the CBI: "the average UK office worker spends an hour and a half a week of work time surfing the web for personal use, at a cost to the economy of £10.6bn a year."

It is estimated that employers across the public and private sectors lose 4.4 per cent of working time in this way, which accounts for 95 minutes a week, or ten days a year, at an average annual cost of £939 per employee.

See Over 90 minutes a week spent on personal websurfing at work.

What the CBI fail to mention is that employees are also said to contribute £26bn a year in unpaid overtime, or 7 hours and 24 minutes of unpaid work each week.

I'm not quite sure why the CBI is moaning so much!

Revised research paper on organizational misbehaviour

I've recently revised a paper I wrote last year on organizational misbehaviour.

It is now set out to map misbehaviour and outline how it may be researched in the future.

A title and abstract:

The many approaches to organisational misbehaviour: A review, map and research agenda

The purpose of the paper is to review extant literature on misbehaviour, re-map its many forms, and provide an up-date research agenda.

What is unique about the paper is that it approaches the main subject from four different perspectives and attempts are made to reconcile incongruous paradigms.

The mapping exercise identifies three core features of misbehaviour: micro-resistance and sabotage; fiddles, pilferage and crime, and, gender and sexuality.

Further emergent features of misbehaviour are identified: humour, management misbehaviour, identity misbehaviour, Internet misbehaviour, and informal survival strategies.

Further recommendations are made in relation to conceptualising and researching misbehaviour.

At last...

It's taken nearly seven years, but it's finally finished!

That is, my Ph.D. on organizational misbehaviour.

It's a very long document - 356 pages or 101,522 words to be precise.

In short, I have tried to explain minor acts of misbehaviour by combining two organizational paradigms - labour process analysis and a social identity approach (social identity theory and self-categorization theory).

I used four case studies and my main method of data collection was covert participant observation.

The findings depart from previous insights into workplace misbehaviour in stressing the importance of acknowledging and investigating both the organizational and sub-group social identities of low status workers, in relation to such activities.

As such, a great deal of the misbehaviour noted in the findings can be attributed to the poor treatment of low status workers by management, yet misbehaviour is equally if not more attributable to the empowering or inhibitive qualities of the many psychological groups that worker can associate with or disassociate themselves from.

Ironically, my main method of collecting data involved keeping a secret diary whilst working as a food hygienist, a hotel waiter, a retail stockroom assistant, and a call centre operator, i.e. I could have blogged about it as well, if I'd known about them in 2001 to 2002!

Developing a theoretical basis for the concept of organizational misbehaviour by James Richards (May 2007).

Feel free to browse through it.