Question

Being lazy is often a quality that is shunned or looked down upon in the workplace. When someone is unwilling to put energy forth into their work, they are, essentially, not engaged with their job. It is still unclear whether someone can have a “lazy” personality, but we can all most likely recall times when we did not want to or commit to putting forth the energy needed to do our work. In many cases, this lead to procrastination or excessive delegation, resulting in a failure to meet tight deadlines. One laziness behavior includes fleeing the scene when one does not want to work; another is one will play the victim and make excuses to make-up for a lack of putting forth effort. Although there has not been much research on laziness (perhaps anyone who has attempted to has not been able to muster the effort!), the research that does exist suggests that trait attributions of laziness are complex. For example, people tend to acknowledge that they have more personality traits than others (e.g., “I am a very complex, multi- faceted person.”). Although someone would not hesitate to say that they are “very energetic”, people tend to qualify laziness with “diminutive” words (e.g., “I am a little bit lazy…”). Similar peculiar effects emerge when considering others’ attributions as well. Even though halo biases (see Chapter 6) can emerge for positive attributions of others (e.g., “She could have easily lied to me about accidentally giving an extra twenty dollars in change back to the customer when she first started working here. She is a fantastic, industrious, and honest person!”), horns biases do not occur as broadly as these positive traits when considering laziness (e.g., a supervisor witnessing an employee lying when she first started working there, may think that she will lie in many circumstances, but will not see this person as lazy). Even more worrisome, laziness can subtly escalate or catch on with others. For instance, one lazy behavior can lead to another, and sunk costs can add up to the point where you reason you will “start over again tomorrow”. Furthermore, recent research suggests that laziness can be contagious—participants, unaware of their shifts toward laziness, started to endorse the same lazy behaviors and decisions that fictional, computer-generated participants were making. The implications here are very intriguing… “for example, if your lazy boss rewards you for having invested more effort in your work, will you become more or less lazy?” Regardless of the negative air surrounding laziness, some have found merit in its practice. For example, Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, asserts that laziness is not necessarily a bad thing and has even helped him succeed: “My laziness serves as a filter… Something has to be really good before I’ll decide to work on it.”

Do you consider laziness to be more of a personality trait, or more of a motivational state that we experience from time-to-time? Why? Is there a potential that it could be a little bit of both? Do you agree or disagree with Michael Lewis that there is an upside to laziness? Why or why not? How do you think managers and organizations can “manage laziness” so that the negative effects would be minimized and the positive effects maximized? What sorts of programs and initiatives could an organization implement that would help do so?

Answer 1

Laziness is more to do with personality than the motivational state. Few people are as good as Mr. Lewis who benefited from his laziness. He is from a category of perfectionists who always want their work to be immaculate and would not engage in it, till they are assured that the output is going to be perfect. However, majority of us use laziness as an excuse for running away from responsibilities and escape the work, and want to achieve more from little efforts. An average person would use laziness more often to escape the work rather than looking for good things to work on. If the laziness had merit, everyone looked for good work, and then there was no one left to do "not so good" pieces of work,and there would be no efficiency in the work areas very few want to do.

Th works will remain the way they are, (with their goodness or badness), and will have to be taken this way. The pieces of work which few find interesting, need to be made more lucrative, engaging, interesting and fun filled to attract good people to do them, so that laziness generated out of disinterest can be dealt with. For others, laziness can be a bad habit and need to be controlled through counselling, training, motivating and mentoring to help the people to be more engaged.