When employees fight each other

Of all the conflicts that affect the workplace, one of the most destabilizing is when employees fight each other. These could be cases when staff move on to protect their turfs and feel like others are attempting to over step their worlds at work. A case in point could be the fight between Mary and Anthony. When Anthony was employed at the local government ministry, he was full of excitement as he settled into his office. He was happy that after a long period of job search in the government, he had finally secured a well paying job. The job was in line with his ambitions as an urban planner and was sure he had eventually struck his right career code.

During his initial months of induction, he had to move from office to office seeking information about the processes and procedures at the workplace as part of the orientation process. He however realized that along the way, one lady Mary, was exhibiting some not interesting attitude towards him. She was generally rough and not inviting every time he would seek for some support from her. Unbeknown to him, Mary was feeling highly threatened by Anthony’s presence at the office  hence she sought to sabotage his work.

Since Anthony was not aware of what the issue was, he kept on checking out on Mary until she turned out violent on one of the mornings. At this specific occasion, as Anthony sought to be linked up with one of the key partners, Mary responded by demanding that he stops seeking favors from partners and settle on what he had been employed to do. This was the start of the long fight between the two. As the fight continued overtly and covertly, the other staff started to notice the bad blood between the two. This affected the team and seemed to split the allegiance of the team into two.

Fights among staff are common occurrences. They are triggered by a raft of reasons, the main ones being the desire to protect personal turfs or the clash of individual personalities. When these fights erupt at work, they have a way of sucking everyone else in the department into it and tend to create factions within the workplace. These teams fight against each other resulting in an organizational fight from what started off as a personal conflict.

It is important to note that as much as disagreements arise at the workplace, it is the responsibility of all the staff to enhance amicable engagements among themselves. We realize that these conflicts are not evitable and should hence work towards resolving all misunderstanding among staff for the peace of the workplace. When there is a fight among or between workmates, the attention and energy of the tasks ahead is diverted as people spend all resources at their disposal to win over the faction branded as the enemy. This leads to reduced productivity and loss of workplace enthusiasm.

It is hence important to identify the conflicts early enough and seek for ways of resolving them as quickly as possible since that which starts off as a harmless fight for control of turfs could easily spiral into a huge storm that could carry every one along.