Managing Employees with Factitious Disorder

Managing difficult employees can be challenging for any management team and especially challenging if the employee is using health related complications as a manipulation tool to achieve some performance review or administrative outcome. If you are managing a team of employees, and if you have one or more employees that seem to always be sick or ill, it is important to consider what may be causing this and how you can overcome the complication.

Employees who are often sick at work, and seemingly sick when there is a demand placed upon them, are typically those who are experiencing a complication with a condition known as factitious disorder. This disorder is described, in psychological terms, as the intentional creation of symptoms or signs of an illness. Often, when employees are in a place where they feel stressed by demands at work, the factitious disorder gives them a reason to leave and go home or to avoid communication with management.

While not all sick employees are engaging in factitious behavior, there are those that will do so and often on a recurring basis. Most managers can identify an employee with factitious disorder as this employee will often call in sick on days when there is much demand in the office, will demonstrate symptoms and signs of illness when stressed in the office, and will often look for attention from coworkers or management when they are presenting their factitious symptoms.

In many cases, stress is the culprit behind factitious disorder in employees. So, if you find that an employee is expressing symptoms at work, or calling in sick on high-demand work days, you may want to consider referring the employee to human resources for intervention in the factitious complication. In many cases, however, when an employee has developed factitious disorder, there is not much that can be done to help the individual and, oftentimes, these types of employees are terminated from employment due to their lack of work production.

Dealing with difficult employees in the workplace is a challenge no matter what your management style. If you are struggling with an employee who may have a factitious disorder, consider monitoring and reporting the behavior to human resources as a way to possibly obtain resolution to the behavior by this individual.

Sources: From Difficult to Disturbed, by Laurence Miller, Ph.D., 155-156.