Malicious compliance is a term often used in business and management settings to describe a person who has an odd way of causing harm to the business. When most people think of a disruptive employee, they think of one who causes a disturbance and doesn’t follow orders. However, malicious compliance features a person exhibiting passive aggressive behavior by following exact management guidelines. They do this because they know that following such rigid guidelines will, in some cases, inflict damage on the company, either in a financial or ethical sense.

A simple way to think about malicious compliance is that it’s a very insane form of sabotage used by people who don’t like their managers. Workers feel the need to somehow damage a manager’s reputation, so they go out of their way to do things that cause that damage. Like where normal sabotage would involve doing something out of character to harm the company, this is a roundabout way of staying within the rules while knowingly hurting a manager’s ability to get the job done. That is the extremely important thing to remember about this type of passive aggressive behavior. The intent and will to harm has to be present, along with a couple of other conditions.

For malicious compliance to occur, several other factors must be present. The manager or superior must give problematic orders without fully knowing the extent of what those orders can cause. In short, he makes a mistake by giving an incorrect order and the worker realizes the mistake. Instead of letting the superior know of the mistake, the knowing worker inflicts malicious compliance on the company. The subordinate must also follow the orders so closely that he never deviates from the given orders. This, in a way, keeps the worker within the rigid guidelines of the rules, but companies do not look kindly on this type of behavior.

Although more companies have put programs in place to monitor various types of sabotage, it is still difficult to discern when a person is actually looking to inflict malicious compliance. It is almost impossible to get into someone’s head and find out exactly what he was thinking at the time of carrying out the orders, so inflicting punishment for this sabotage is almost impossible. The key for companies is to maintain a good working agreement so workers never think of something like malicious compliance.