Interpersonal conflict is inevitable and
can occur in different levels of interaction – at work, among friends, within
families and between relationship partners. A conflict of interest exists when the actions of one person attempting
to maximize his or her needs and benefits, block, interfere with, injure, or in
some way make less effective the actions of another person attempting to
maximize his or her needs or benefits.
Imagine
a scenario at the workplace. Chloe is an intern who has recently started
working in a company. She is working
with four other colleagues in her department and her job is mainly to provide
general lab support to her colleagues. Sometimes
she needs to multitask as each of her colleagues demand her to get their work
done first. Therefore, she is either busy going up and down the company or all
alone by herself in the laboratory. Apart from that, she needs to do some basic
housekeeping as well as filing of documents. But the problem comes when each of
her colleagues place a big stack of documents on her desk for filing to be
done. The moment she cleared this stack, her colleagues would immediately place
another stack on her desk. The same thing happens every day and Chloe is under
tremendous stress. She is both emotionally and physically exhausted as she
feels that her work is never ending. However, she dare not raise this matter to
her supervisor as she does not want her colleagues to have the wrong impression
that she is bad-mouthing them behind their backs. Eventually, she had emotional
breakdown and cried.
The above situation can be avoided if Chloe
did not bottle up her feelings. Firstly, she should learn how to de-stress herself
by taking a time out. Once she has
calmed down, she can provide feedback to her colleagues about how she feels
about her workload and kindly seeks for their understanding. Most importantly,
she should learn how to say “NO” whenever things are beyond her ability. Her
colleagues should also show empathy by putting themselves in her shoes. Furthermore,
they should be more sensitive to her nonverbal signals such as body language,
facial expressions and tone of voice.
If you had been in such situation, what
would you do to alleviate this problem? Would you approach your supervisor
first?
Hi Yi Rui
ReplyDeleteThat seems like a typical workplace conflict which many of us will go through in future! I do agree that her colleagues lack empathy when they fail to understand the intern's capabilities, however when this kind of things happen in the workplace, things get a bit tricky.
She definitely has to learn to balance her emotions and her capabilities, this will prove her to be a capable employee that is able to work under stress. It may not be wise for her to reject work from her colleagues directly, because that may make her seem incapable.
A possible tactful way would be to present all the work she has completed to her supervisor, as soon as she finishes them. Her supervisor will then know how much work she has done, and if he/she feels that some work are out of her job scope, he/she will be the one to direct the arrow away for her. This makes her a competent employee, yet able to protect herself from irrelevant work, and more importantly, tactful at handling office politics!
Just sharing some techniques to be office-savvy.
Cheers
Jieyang