What is Work Discipline? How is it provided? Discipline at Work

Discipline is necessary and inevitable in all aspects of social life in order to prevent chaos and establish social peace. The main objective of discipline is to ensure that the employee acts in accordance with the performance standards of the organization. When the employee fails to fulfill the requirements of the job, he or she is subject to disciplinary action. Failure to fulfill expectations may be directly related to the work performed by the employee, or it may be related to rules and regulations.

The other purpose of the concept of work discipline is to create and maintain an environment of mutual respect and trust between the employee and the manager. When misapplied, discipline can lead to problems such as low morale, resentment and manager-employee polarization. In such cases, improvements in the behavior of the employee will be short-lived and the manager will need to discipline the employee again in a short time. For this reason, disciplinary practices should not only correct the behavior, but also minimize the problems that may occur in the relations between the manager and the employee.

There are two principles for carrying out disciplinary action. The first is to ensure that the interests of the organization as a whole are not harmed; the second is to protect the rights of individuals, in other words, to ensure job security. Management must first decide what kind of behavior it expects from its employees and how it hopes to achieve it by creating an environment of responsive leadership and constructive discipline. A healthy disciplinary climate must then be achieved at all levels and in every unit of the organization and a specific disciplinary process must be established to respond to the need for consistent disciplinary action.

However, it is very difficult to create a healthy disciplinary climate because there is a conflict of interest between those who are managed and those who manage, or because employees have different attitudes, expectations and behaviors. The fact that the actions performed exceed the disciplinary limit often leads to the concept of mobbing in the workplace. For this reason, it can be said that one of the most important issues in working life is “discipline”.