From Pranksters to Malicious Attackers

There are many forms of workplace sabotage that occurs from benign pranks to destructive malicious attacks. According to Survey: Collision of technology, ethics seen there are several levels of sabotage that could fall into a gray area between pranks and malicious attacks. For example the locking of someone's workstation on the one hand it could be considered a prank from one employee to another, on the other hand it could be seen as a malicious attack stopping productivity of the company's employees.

Why Do Workers Intentionally Sabotage Their Workplace?

The number one reason found to be the reason why employees try to sabotage their workplace is because they are unhappy with something in their workplace, whether it be a supervisor, an unreceived promotion, or disciplinary actions taken agaist that employee. In this article Sabotage the condition of the termination is one of the scenarios that could cause employees to sabotage their workplace. In this article Why workers sabotage office computers it shows some statistics about why workers sabotage and some of the statistics on how much each sabotage could cause a company.

How Do Employees Sabotage

As workplace resources have evolved over the years so has employee sabotage. No longer is employee sabotage confined to just the stealing of company's physical resources but now it has expanded to the stealing of or destruction of a company's digital resources. According to Employees seen as computer saboteurs one way this is happening is by the use of innocent digital devices such as mp3 players, digital cameras, or PDAs to smuggle ditital material in or out of the company. When they are smuggling material into the company they are usually bringing in something that would destroy company resources and when they are smuggling something out they are usually stealing company property.

Identifying and Preventing Employee Sabotage

Some of the best prevention against employee sabotage is to be aware of how employees are feeling, and good security measures. Both of these articles Employee sabotage comes in many sizes and shapes and Handle employee sabotage talk about how to detect and prevent employee sabotage. Some ways to prevent employee sabotage is by training your managers to spot behaviour that may lead to employee sabotage and to remove the reasons for an employee to become dissatisfied to the point of sabotage. Some good ways to detect sabotage and/or fix sabotage is by having good security protocols including anti-virus programs, firewalls, logging tools, and requiring good security practices like locking worksations.