I’d like to propose two things that could be taken to address the situation.

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Rebellious workers here refer to some of the workers we find in the workforce who generally does not like to follow existing procedures or policies but likes to “rebel” or do things their own way. I hear of this problem from a friend who tells me he faces such a problem in his company. These group of people who constantly rebels are usually of a younger age profile – some of the literature has dubbed them generation X or Y, but let’s not get into a discussion on categorization. This is an important demographic group because they are the future work force, the employees that will work in organizations of the future. The issue is how do you manage this group of employees, who has

a penchant of not following company procedures in carrying of their work? They may get the work done at the end of the day but the process they use to go about it is different. Is this all bad, you may ask? In fact, it could be something positive because these workers are using their creativity to get things done. So, it depends on the situation and what type of business your company is in. If it is a creative business like an advertising firm, yes, this may be a quality that you seek in your employees, always coming up with fresh ideas of running advertising campaigns.

However, too much free rein in doing things can lead to chaos. Chaos is what you may be trying to prevent if you’d like to have greater efficiency to meet deadlines, for example. You may also want employees to follow a certain process or way of doing things (e.g. in a strict sequence) because of regulatory requirements. The problem is these employees don’t want to follow company procedures. They like do things their own way and even though they may produce the results at the end of the day, you may have to ask them to do some rework of the intermediate steps in order to comply to certain regulatory requirements and this results in more time wasted – what do you do if you are the manager or person in charge? Fire them and find some new blood? Assuming you don’t want to fire them because they have the experience already, what can you do?

This conflict can be seen as a pair of the opposing values, between compliance (follow the procedures) and “rebel” values or freedom (do it my way) - see diagram. The compliance value is associated with control and following orders, while “rebel” values is about flexibility and having control over their own way of doing things.