Hello all,
People join organizations when their personal goals are aligned with the organization's goals. However, how we achieve those goals vary from person to person. As a result, conflict, whether it is positive or negative, is inevitable.
I have spoken before about a previous job I held that had a poor management team. They would often use coercive power to get what they wanted from their employees. Coercive power is the capacity to punish another, or at least to create a perceived threat to do so (Newstrom, 2015).
[Organizational politics] represents a unique domain of interpersonal relations, characterized by the direct or indirect (active or passive) engagement of people in influence tactics and power struggles (Vigoda, 2010). The organizational politics at my previous job had been dysfunctional since before I started working there in 2015. I quickly learned that the one could not achieve their goal without adopting a self-serving attitude and manipulating the system. Of course, this causing a lot of conflict from the corporate office all the way down to the employees. For example, if the kitchen manager did not get her way she would say, "If y'all don't start picking it up, I'm going to start playing with your money!" In other words, she was threating to purposely sabotage us in some way so that do not receive a decent tip. This was her way of teaching us a lesson. As a server, our survival is heavily dependent on the tips we make. The money we make hourly (ft2.1tti/hr.) goes to taxes, so we rarely get paychecks. When someone is threatening your survival, a natural reaction is to fight back. The ensuing conflict was destructive because it caused workplace incivility. According to (Newstrom, 2015), workplace incivility occurs when employees fail to exhibit concern and regard for others or--worse yet--disrespect each other on the job. As a result, the environment was almost always hostile. There was not a day that went by where there was not some sort of conflict between management and employees.
They have lost a lot of good people since then, but they have also managed to get rid of a lot of bad apples. I visited the store recently and the air seemed a lot calmer than before.
References:
Newstrom, J. (2015). Organizational Behavior: Human Behavior at Work (1ffith ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Vigoda, G. E., & Talmud, I. (2010). Organizational politics and job outcomes: The moderating effect of trust and social support. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, ffi0(11), 2829-2861. https://doi- org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.0068tti.x