Organizations often employ people
of various backgrounds and personality types.
While the goal is to have all employees get along and work in harmony,
sometimes these variances can lead to issues, or conflict. Conflict in the workplace is inevitable,
especially in large scale or stressful jobs.
Often, the conflicts can be resolved amongst those involved in the
situation, but there are certain instances where management needs to become
involved.
I can thankfully say that I have never personally been involved in conflict in the workplace. I am also lucky that between all of my former jobs, there is only one issue that comes to mind. Unfortunately, this conflict started between two employees and resulted in the termination of one of them. This occurred shortly after I had started working at a restaurant. The issue was between two male employees, I will call them Employee A and Employee B. Employee A used to date a female coworker for several months before the relationship ended. From my understanding, the break up was not a good one. Due to summer vacation, several months passed where Employee A and his ex were not around one another. At the restart of school, Employee A found out that his ex-girlfriend and another coworker, Employee B had begun dating. This led to a lot of tension because all involved in the situation were still currently working. Management was aware of this issue, but there was not much that could be done. One day, when Employee A and B were off, they both ended up being in the bar at the same time. After several drinks and an exchange of words, Employee A punched Employee B. The next day, management called Employee A in and he was ultimately fired.
I can thankfully say that I have never personally been involved in conflict in the workplace. I am also lucky that between all of my former jobs, there is only one issue that comes to mind. Unfortunately, this conflict started between two employees and resulted in the termination of one of them. This occurred shortly after I had started working at a restaurant. The issue was between two male employees, I will call them Employee A and Employee B. Employee A used to date a female coworker for several months before the relationship ended. From my understanding, the break up was not a good one. Due to summer vacation, several months passed where Employee A and his ex were not around one another. At the restart of school, Employee A found out that his ex-girlfriend and another coworker, Employee B had begun dating. This led to a lot of tension because all involved in the situation were still currently working. Management was aware of this issue, but there was not much that could be done. One day, when Employee A and B were off, they both ended up being in the bar at the same time. After several drinks and an exchange of words, Employee A punched Employee B. The next day, management called Employee A in and he was ultimately fired.
This conflict is definitely not the
norm in a workplace and it escalated more than a normal conflict would. I believe that there were several conflict resolution
and management issues at play here that led to the extreme outcome. First and foremost, I believe that the
alcohol involved led Employee A to lose sight of his emotional intelligence. In any normal interaction, Employee A was civil
to both Employee B and his girlfriend.
With the addition of alcohol, he was unable to deal with emotions and
relationships the same way he would have normally. I also believe that management could have
further prevented this issue. The
management knew that Employee B and the girl had started a new relationship
shortly after it happened. They should
have seen this as a potential conflict from the beginning. Intuition and judgement should have given
them a heads up that there might be a problem in the future, especially knowing
that workers have access to alcohol and often hung out after work. To be fair, they were in a tough
position. All of the employees involved
were senior members and important to training new members which often put them
working together. I believe that they
took a low advocacy and low inquiry approach which led to them being passive in
their conflict resolution pre altercation.
One thing I believe that they absolutely did right was to terminate
Employee A immediately after the incident.
He was completely in the wrong with hitting another person under any circumstance. Their swift action in not only firing him,
but having him banned from the premise set the tone to others that physical
violence will not be tolerated. This was
a high advocacy and low inquiry approach in that they took strong action and
while they listened to both sides of the story, there was not many other
options with how to handle the situation.
I liked the way how this blogpost is written. I followed the story very well. However, I find this problem really hard, since the real problem is outside the reach of the manager and therefore I'm not sure if I agree with the fact that the manager should be involved in this problem. I think that it would be good as a manager to talk to employees that experience the tension and to make clear to them that a fight is not accepted. If the fight will happen (just as it did), I think I would fire both of the employees, since it is not the manager's job to choose whose fault it was (since it is personal). I wonder if the manager could introduce an incentive to reduce the tension about this problem on the work floor to avoid this whole situation. On the other hand, the problem is not related to the tasks and work itself, so I can also see the point of staying out of this problem as a manager.
ReplyDeleteYou said in your first paragraph that conflict is inevitable. I believe disagreement is inevitable - people have opinions and from time to time there will be differences of opinion. Disagreement between otherwise reasonable people can usually be resolved. Conflict is different.
ReplyDeleteThe story you told is definitely about conflict. It is the first one I've seen written by a student where it literally came to blows. However, the way you told the story it is unclear that it could have been prevented in any way other than either A or B finding a job elsewhere before A got married. In other words, your story really was about peoples' personal lives, which surely can be a source of conflict, but which is usually separate from their work lives.
Management can't alway keep the personal lives of employees outside the workplace, but there are some unwritten rules about trying to do that. On the complete other end of the spectrum, when my kids where very little I brought them into the office office once or twice and that seemed to be fine. Co-workers dating, in contrast, is playing with fire.
The general issue is definitely outside my expertise as to how it should be managed. The unwritten rules I mentioned get learned the way many other unwritten rules get learned, by word of mouth, informally and casually. The University does have training about sexual harassment, but to my knowledge it has no policy about employees dating. Maybe that is for the better. I'm not really sure.
I agree that there was not much that management could do to prevent this conflict. Due to a lack of rules against employee dating, there was not much that could be done. Technically both employees had acted in accordance with the rules prior to the incident. Firing one of the employees pre incident was not an option either because up until that point, no one had done anything wrong. I also think that personal lives can lead to conflict in the workplace in other cases. Foe example, if an employee is having personal issues at home and he or she is letting those issues affect their work, this could create conflict with their coworkers.
ReplyDeleteThis was a very interesting read in that I thought that I was reading a scenario out of a movie!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the management made the right decision in firing the employee as the repercussions of their fight would've been harder to manage than simply training more employees to replace his position. If none of the employees were fired, the management and all the employees would've been on their toes not knowing when the next fight will break out. Also, I can imagine there would've been a lot of backlash from other employees if no further actions would've taken place.
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ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting conflict story you told. It also provides good grounds to explore the potential roles for management in situations ripe for conflict among employees. While, realistically speaking, it would be impractical to keep an employee that has dealt blows to one of their coworkers for legal and ethical reasons, there is a certain gray area in what the best course of action for management would have been before the fight.
ReplyDeleteManagement might have forbidden employees from having romantic relationships with each other in the first place in order to quash the potential for conflicts of this sort. However, this could be seen as management becoming overly authoritarian and focusing too much on tasks (maintaining a functioning, orderly restaurant) and not taking employee feelings into account. This can lead to an entirely different set of management-employee conflicts.
Without forbidding romantic relationships, as you said, management might have taken steps to diffuse potential tensions in this situation before they boiled over. People lose their inhibitions when they are intoxicated, so Employee A was clearly feeling negative emotions over this beforehand. While you imply that this course of action is the one that management "should" have taken, possibly by keeping the two employees from working together, I question whether it was actually the best path. This course of action could have lead management into the same trap as in the previous paragraph of being overly authoritarian by over-controlling the employees' work environment, and experiencing the consequences thereof. Management might have noticed possible tensions beforehand and actually made the decision that, as their employees are adults, they could manage their own personal hangups independently of management.
This is just some food for thought.