Role conflicts often involve conflicts between individuals due to competing interests due to their official roles. Common role conflicts include
supervisor / employee, employee / consultant, union / management and personal / professional.
Supervisor / Employee
The supervisor has this role because their job is to manage the group or project toward a completion date, within a specified budget and with limited resources. The employee may have pride in their work but may focus on the details of their own position regardless of the project. Supervisors tangibly benefit by requesting unpaid overtime or stressful conditions that improve productivity.
Employees benefit from a slower work pace regardless of their pay rate. Employees may not realize that failure to perform key tasks on time threatens the whole project and the entire team’s employment. The employees often resent lack of information or flexibility in execution of their jobs. Employees are subordinate to a supervisor who can fire them or make their employment difficult.
Employee / Consultant
Consultants generate resentment by coming in from outside, often at a much higher rate than general employees. Consultants are free of the group’s social ties of the employees but can create disruption within the work group. Management tends to bring in consultants when a workplace change is required. However, conflicts arise when consultants are seen as co-opting ideas employees already had or even recommended. A stream of consultants attempting to improve the workplace is actively resisted since they are seen as a temporary inconvenience that will make no permanent difference.
Union / Management
Unions began with employees jointly stopping work until conditions improved. Unions have used the constant threats of shutting down the workplace to bargain for better pay and benefits. While this initially improved conditions for employees, unions have now achieved greater pay and benefits than the general workforce.
This causes resentment from management, since their demands eat into the profits that would result if free market pay rates and benefits were given. Unions have also used their brute force to bring closed shop rules or levy union contracts onto employers. Managers see themselves as constrained, unable to fire poor performers without management approval.
Nor can they offer merit bonuses to the best employees, since union contracts tend to favor seniority. This further hampers productivity within the union workshop, to the dismay of management. Unions see management as the greedy elite who do not want to share the profits earned by the business. Unions / management conflicts are frequently witnessed in strikes, but the conflicts arise with each management decision that requires consultation with the union.
Personal / Professional
Personal relationships are those that take place outside the workplace. Friendships, family ties, enemies and neighbors are examples of personal relationships. Professional relationships include supervisor, employee, consultant, peer and mentor. Yet the professional world often overlaps with the personal world.
The conflicts arise when a personal obligation conflicts with a professional one or vice versa.
This conflict is one reason why dating in the work place is verboten. Personal relationships tend to result in professional bias. When deciding who to lay off, the friend is kept while the more productive person is let go. The lover receives a higher raise because of the emotional bias, regardless of actual workplace performance. Laws protecting against discrimination rarely apply when the preference is based upon relationships outside of work.
