The professional workplace is a complex world; it’s more than just doing your assigned job accurately and ahead of the deadline. As a human being that can’t live without social interaction, miscommunication, disagreement, or other relationship drama like conflict and confrontation, things like that are bound to happen no matter how competent and professional we are. There are so many things that can get us involved in an uncomfortable situation like office politics.

Office politics is an activity that involves power and authority by individuals to improve the status and advance their agenda at work–sometimes at the expense of others, which is why it often comes with negative competition. For example, to be ahead of the other, an employee gets close to many of the new employees at the company so he can form a team under him. Another example is when an employee always treats the other with food or anything so they will always listen to him when the boss isn’t around or defend him even when he did something wrong. Office politics is a broad term and there can be a lot of kind of it. It can even happen due to disagreement and personal conflict between two people which results in office politics because of their hatred and can’t separate the personal and professional life.

Now, the question is how do we prevent or navigate the conflict? It depends on each person but the least we can do is we have to be open-minded and critical. In simpler words, we have to judge the problem one by one and consider all factors: who is the person? What is he like? How is he doing? How is the team’s condition? And a lot more. We have to judge the situation as objectively as we can because sometimes, it’s not about whom or what is right and wrong. Of course, it doesn’t mean that we can always solve or not get involved in office politics in the workplace, but we can at least minimize the problem or conflict even by little.

 

Keyword: Communication, Professional, Workplace, Workplace Ethics & Behaviour

By:Meivy Wilnio | 2201755421 

 

This article is based on a PR Lab practicum project for the Workplace Ethics & Behaviour course