A Perfectly Evil Organization: Using Organizational Design to Create a Culture of Fear

In the tradition of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, this article is written with a reverse perspective to heighten faulty organizational designs that can have a negative impact on employees. Even though most organizations do not set out to create a culture of fear, their organizational design still reinforce this climate. This debilitating behavior is caused by communicating selectively, reorganizing unnecessarily, designing for control, and blindsiding people. These elements contribute to an organization’s culture of fear and solidifies the employees low status as worker bees within a hive.