We’ve all been there: driven half mad by the colleague who micromanages, the boss who bullies, the co-worker asleep on the job… So how do we navigate the messy world of office politics?
Twenty years ago, the American psychologist Tessa West began arriving early to the department store at which she worked, so she could avoid the salespeople she spent most of her time with. Really, she was hoping to escape just one colleague – someone with whom she disagreed about shop-floor etiquette. (Her: don’t steal clients. The co-worker: why not?) In the early mornings, West could be sure they wouldn’t run into each other, saving her from stress and anxiety, which can lead to ill health. “It’s not that I thought anything bad was going to happen,” she recalls, via Zoom. “It was the not-knowing what would happen,” and “the increase in heart-rate” that comes with that uncertainty. Soon the situation became so preoccupying that West quit, not so much resolving the conflict as bypassing it altogether. “Did it work? Sure. But how much energy did that take up? A lot.”
West, who is now 40, is a professor of psychology at New York University, where she runs the West Interpersonal Perception Lab, a research unit that studies, broadly, how we deal with each other, and how those interactions affect our mental and physiological states. “I spent the first 10 years of my career doing basic science on how people communicate,” she says, which included “a lot of time in labs evoking horrible experiences to see what people do.” (One study involved West sitting participants in a chair and “being mean” to them, to measure their stress responses.) Before long, she noticed that a lot of what she was observing could be captured in the workplace: how individuals influence groups, how status affects persuasion and morale, how anxiety affects everyday relations. And the more she researched, the more she realised that, like her younger self, very few of us know how to resolve everyday conflict at work.
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