I've been very close to becoming that employee in the past, and it was 100% due to the sense that I had no say or input within my team. Being treated like a cog in the machinery after working hard to expand my skill set and become a productive member of the team.
A good chunk of my extended family is also super passive-aggressive, and I grew up seeing that as the norm, so I have to slap myself every time I start to act that way. It sucks.
I had to find out what motivated me and make sure that my boss knew it so they could give me the opportunity to exercise my passion. In my case, I like tinkering with processes, improving workflows, teaching others, and learning anything and everything adjacent to my work. I was given the chance to help overhaul some of our workflows and work with some other employees on skill development, and that fixed things right up.
It's all about motivation - what does this person really want out of the job?
Not many bosses really try to find out what their employees want - they think "well we're paying them [$$$] so therefore they are required to be happy and not complain".
There's a big, big difference in motivators between generations in the workforce right now. Younger folks generally want purpose and development as their main motivators.
I suspect this has something to do with pay flatlining while productivity skyrocketed over the past 20-40 years. If the pay barely lets me survive, I'm going to need something more to make my life meaningful. I know it did for me when I was barely making ends meet for the first 3-4 years of my career. (As a side note, it's no wonder we can't attract top talent when that is the norm.)
I don't think that's the situation @williwaw is in. It sounds like he has given the employee the opportunity to express what they want, and they simply have a bad attitude. But maybe that employee really doesn't know what they want - and it's entirely possible that they are one of those toxic personalities that just isn't going to get any better without them doing a lot of work on themselves. And you can't fix that on the job.
I agree with some of the other posters that it's far better to let these people go if you have made sincere efforts to help them out.
Because if there's anything worse than being treated like a cog in the machinery, it's being treated like a cog in the machinery while seeing someone else throw wrenches into the gears, and still get paid as much or more than me.
Any other employees watching this situation are going to wonder why Mr. Bad Attitude is being kept around, and...hey maybe he's right about some of those things he's griping about...
Part of the underlying problem in my situation and likely others, is over the last decade or more, the people that control the purse strings in my organization, have focused their attention on creating efficiency using technology like GNSS, robots, etc., over the people who have to make those systems work. I??ve heard it many times that it??s just too expensive for them to add a new employee with the cost of benefits and so on, so they would instead focus on technology to automate as much as possible. This ??do more with less?? approach works to a point, after which it begins to break down when the small group of employees responsible for making it all work, find themselves overwhelmed by the complexities of these systems when they break down and our limitations, both physically and mentally. I see it as something of a recipe for burn out and bad attitudes. In this particular region where I live there are very few, scratch that, no other survey jobs that pay as well as my organization so just walking away isn??t much of an option. So under these circumstances, attitude becomes even more important than ever because having a poor one is the first symptom of defeat. It falls on me to try and head that off, at least until I can retire. With all that said, I??ll study this thread to try and get a better handle on the problem and also in what ways I might also be contributing. The one thing that I??ve come up with is a half hour on Friday afternoon for what I call an informal ??airing of grievances??, sort of a Seinfeld Festivus for the rest of us. Get that stuff out so we aren??t stewing over it, but no Kumbaya or group hugs. Have to draw the line somewhere.
