Are Difficult Employees Really Difficult, or Is Something Going On?
The phrase “difficult employee” sounds like a diagnosis. It is not.
It is usually a description of somebody else’s experience: this person takes too much energy, asks too many questions, pushes back, reacts strongly, misses the social rhythm of the team, refuses to go along, or makes management uncomfortable.
Sometimes the description is accurate in the ordinary sense. Some employees behave badly. They can be rude, manipulative, unreliable, aggressive, chronically negative, or unwilling to do reasonable work. A humane workplace still needs standards, boundaries, coaching, documentation, and consequences.
But “difficult” becomes dangerous when it ends the investigation instead of beginning it.
The label encourages a dispositional story: the problem lives inside the person. Once that story takes hold, leaders can stop asking what else might be happening. The workload disappears. The process disappears. The manager disappears. The history of the conflict disappears. The employee’s previous performance disappears. The rule changes disappear. The context becomes background noise and personality becomes the explanation.
Organizational psychology gives us several reasons to resist that shortcut.
The employee who speaks up may not be the employee creating the problem
Amy Edmondson’s 1999 study on psychological safety introduced a construct that has become central to modern workplace research: whether people believe a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Can I ask a question? Admit a mistake? Challenge an idea? Raise a concern? Say I do not understand? Disagree with somebody who has more power?
Elizabeth Morrison’s research on employee voice and silence examines what influences whether employees communicate concerns and suggestions upward or withhold them. Silence is not proof that everything is fine. Voice is not proof that somebody is difficult.
That matters because organizations often reward the emotional smoothness of silence. The employee who does not raise the problem is easy. The person who says, “We keep missing the same control,” “This deadline is not possible with the current staffing,” or “The criteria changed after the work was completed” can become the friction point.
The uncomfortable employee may be wrong. They may also be early.
Role ambiguity can look like incompetence or attitude
People perform inside roles, and roles need boundaries. Tubre and Collins’ meta-analysis found a negative relationship between role ambiguity and job performance. That does not mean every confused employee performs poorly, and it does not mean ambiguity is the only cause of performance problems. It means unclear roles are not a trivial inconvenience.
A workplace can tell an employee to “take ownership” without defining authority. It can tell them to “move faster” while requiring five approvals. It can ask them to “be proactive” and then criticize them for acting without permission. It can tell them they are responsible for an outcome while withholding the information or resources needed to produce it.
Then management sees hesitation, repeated clarification questions, inconsistent execution, or frustration and decides the employee is difficult.
Sometimes the employee is not resisting work. They are responding to contradictory control signals.
Burnout can change the person you think you are managing
The Job Demands-Resources model offers another useful lens. Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, and Schaufeli distinguished between demands that consume effort and resources that help people meet those demands. Their research linked job demands more strongly with exhaustion and lack of resources with disengagement.
That gives leaders a practical question when somebody’s behavior changes: what changed before the behavior changed?
Did workload increase? Did staffing drop? Did autonomy disappear? Did a supportive manager leave? Did priorities multiply? Did the employee stop receiving information they used to have? Did they take on emotional labor that never appeared in the job description?
A previously engaged employee who becomes cynical, detached, irritable, or unwilling to stretch may still be responsible for how they behave. But if leadership only coaches tone and never examines conditions, the organization may keep treating the smoke while feeding the fire.
Fairness changes behavior too
Organizational justice research makes this harder to ignore. Colquitt and colleagues’ meta-analysis separated different dimensions of justice, including whether outcomes are fair, procedures are fair, people are treated with dignity, and explanations are adequate. These dimensions were related to outcomes such as satisfaction, commitment, citizenship behavior, withdrawal, performance, and evaluations of authority.
Get Dr. Tiffany Antoine’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
That means employees do not react only to what they receive. They react to how decisions are made, how they are treated during the process, and whether leadership explains itself honestly.
A manager may call an employee “argumentative.” The employee may experience themselves as repeatedly asking for the rule to stay the same. Both people can sincerely believe their version. The work is to move from identity claims to evidence.
Difficult behavior can also be genuinely difficult behavior
A systems lens should not become an excuse machine. Individual differences matter. Research on counterproductive work behavior shows that personality and job satisfaction can relate to behaviors that harm organizations or coworkers. Workplace incivility research also shows how disrespect can escalate through reciprocal spirals.
So a responsible analysis has to hold two ideas at once: environments shape behavior, and people remain responsible for behavior.
The question is not whether we blame the person or blame the system. The question is what combination of person, role, relationship, process, incentives, and environment is producing the pattern we can observe.
The Lean Six Sigma question: does the defect travel with the person, or stay with the process?
My Lean Six Sigma training makes me suspicious of recurring stories that always end with a different person being blamed. If three people in a row fail in the same role, you do not have enough evidence to conclude you hired three uniquely defective humans. You have a process signal.
If every employee under one manager becomes “negative,” inspect the management system. If every new person misunderstands the same task, inspect the instruction. If every project turns into conflict at the same approval gate, inspect governance. If the same employee struggles everywhere they go, then the individual pattern deserves more weight.
Root-cause work is not softer than accountability. It is more exact.
The Jungian layer: who gets assigned the shadow?
From a depth-psychology perspective, and this is interpretation rather than diagnosis, groups can organize around projection. The employee who is angry may become the container for anger everybody else has learned not to express. The person who challenges authority may become the carrier of the group’s disowned rebellion. The quiet worker may be called aloof because their self-containment activates somebody else’s fear of rejection. The confident employee may be called arrogant because they disturb an authority structure built around deference.
None of this proves that the employee’s behavior is healthy. Projection can coexist with real behavior problems. That is why observable description matters so much.
“She is impossible” tells me almost nothing. “She raised her voice twice in a meeting after being told the previously approved scope had changed, then sent a hostile message to two coworkers” gives me behavior, trigger, sequence, and impact. Now there is something to examine.
A shamanic reflection on the person carrying the symptom
My shamanic practice gives me another language for the same dynamic. This is spiritual reflection, not scientific evidence.
In a system, the visible disturbance is not always located where the imbalance began. One person can become the place where tension surfaces. The group may then try to remove the symptom without asking what keeps generating it.
Sometimes removing the person resolves the issue. Sometimes the next person eventually becomes the new problem employee because the underlying pattern never changed.
That repetition is worth respecting.
Before you label the employee
Ask what the employee actually does, not what adjective people use. Ask when the behavior began. Ask what changed before it began. Ask whether expectations are written and stable. Ask whether the employee has the authority, information, time, staffing, and tools to meet the expectation. Ask what attempts they made to raise the issue. Ask whether the same rule is applied to peers. Ask whether similar conflict has happened in the same role or under the same leader.
Then decide what belongs to the employee and what belongs to the organization.
You can say, “The workload is unreasonable, and you still cannot insult your coworker.” You can say, “The manager changed the expectation, and you still need to document the concern professionally.” You can say, “The employee needs coaching, and the process needs redesign.”
Adults can hold more than one cause at a time.
Difficult is a label. Good leadership requires a diagnosis.
If this topic resonates, Book Six of the Inner Work for Professionals series, Why That Coworker Bothers You So Much (It’s Not About Them), explores projection, triggers, and what colleagues activate in us. Book Eight, Why Leadership Books Keep Missing Something Essential, examines the psychological layer leaders miss when they rely only on techniques, competencies, and frameworks.
