I will describe an ongoing conflict a friend of mine has been undergoing for the past three months and that I have been observing for that same amount of time. I will replace their names with an alias in order to protect their identities and privacy.
My good friend Tony is in an ongoing workplace conflict with his coworker Tammi. They both work as pharmacy technicians. She has been a constant critic of Tony's work. For example, she will go to their manager to criticize or question Tony's work even when this is a process she has not taken part in before or a process that Tony generally has a good track record in completing. It is worthy to note that he is twenty years old and she is twenty four years old, so she may feel like she has some authority over him because of their age discrepancy. She has also used the argument that she has been a manager elsewhere, so she would know about what to do better than Tony would in their identical job. That being said, Tony has also been in this position for a longer period of time than Tammi.
Another root of the conflict appears when the pharmacy is getting busy. The pharmacy is low on staffing, which is recognizably a problem in itself, and occasionally Tony will ask if Tammi would mind filling some prescriptions while he takes care of some customers as he cannot do both jobs at simultaneously. Tammi replies, "Actually, I do mind,” and in most cases go either on a break or start to complete other tasks that are not necessary to be completed in the immediate future such as organizing the already-completed prescriptions. By doing this, she is setting up Tony to work in insurmountable odds as well as create an unproductive environment in the pharmacy.
In order to try to resolve this conflict, Tony approached Tammi and called her out on what she has been doing to him. In response, she laughed and told the senior technicians and pharmacists on duty, “Look what ‘your boy’ said to me now.” Backlash also occurred from this attempted resolution. An increased number of instances occurred where she undermined his work or under-produced on her end of the job. After these increases in occurrences, one of the senior pharmacy technicians, Nikki, has now taken notice of the conflict. She started to notice that she not only acts this way towards Tony but to other people as well. She proceeded to ask Tony if Tammi has done it towards anybody else and why he did not bring this up to her or anybody else before. He then explained that he attempted to resolve this situation on his own before. This conflict was then escalated to the pharmacy manager Bianca. Tammi’s rude behavior has since been treated with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. They have also modified the schedules to prevent Tony’s and Tammi’s shifts from overlapping with each other as much as possible.
Ultimately, this conflict has since resolved pretty well but it is hard to determine whether the backlash from confronting Tammi could have been prevented. If Tony would have first brought this conflict up to a senior technician or manager, backlash still could have occurred just after the conflict would have been “resolved”. It was inevitable that it came to some form of solution along with some backlash, but I am of the opinion that it could have come either sooner if Tony would have spoken up or came up with other strategies for a resolution. I also believe that the solution to this conflict can be attributed to a discussion I have had in my previous post on team production concerning distributive and procedural fairness. It seems to me, as an observer, that the manager Bianca acted to resolve this conflict with more distributive fairness than the procedural fairness that is in place. This method of distributive fairness is where the resolution is what she believes Tammi deserved. As an alternative, in these events, an employee may be written-up and these acts may be put on file to contribute to further conflict resolution or to determine whether the employee should be working there anymore or not. It is the opinion of not only myself but of the senior technicians on duty with Tammi that she should have been written-up for her actions. This act of procedural fairness coupled with Tony speaking up earlier may have resolved this conflict with significantly less backlash.
This is a good story and does fit the bill for real work related conflict. But I wish you had expanded on the point about the pharmacy being understaffed. If you had gotten into the cause of that, it might better explain what else is going on in your story.
ReplyDeleteI'll elaborate with a general principal, based on adverse selection that we studied in the insurance market. If the labor market for this position were more robust, it would seem that somebody like Tammi would get fired and replaced with somebody who is more of a team player and therefor more productive. But if filling such positions at wages that the pharmacy is willing to pay is difficult, then they might feel that sometimes they have to tolerate employees who are uncooperative.
In other words, separation is often an alternative to managing a problem to improve performance. Further - and this is the real point I want to get at - the threat of separation can get people to see the error in their ways, particularly if they might have a hard time finding another job. But if such a threat is not credible, then the person seems to be holding the chips and can pretty much act as they please. In this case the manager may have concluded the same thing, which is why a wrist slap was administered, nothing more.
So it would be good to know if that is explanation. I should also say that as a person who goes to a pharmacy quite regularly as a consumer, the people whom I see working behind the counter seem much older than Tony and Tammi. Sometimes I do wait a while, and I'm not the most patient with that, but it is usually other customers who slow things down, not the people working the pharmacy.