Individual Analysis
Over the years working at Target, I have experiences many different situations where there were plenty of disagreements and situations that I have had to deal with. In the end, I do believe that it will make the team stronger after working problems out though. I can remember my first year with the company; my manager would always ask us in the backroom what they can do to help us pull item faster and back stock faster. We would always come up with a bunch of new and bright ideas. The manager would always say they love them and were going to get around to the new ideas soon. Well time and time again, we realized that they were never going through with their word. I didn’t understand how they can constantly ask us and then never do it.
So one day in the middle of my shift when all of my other work was done, I started doing what I suggested to them in the first place. I started adding some more bulk pallet racking so we would be more efficient and it wouldn’t be so messy back there. Right in the middle of it, he asked me what I’m doing. So I told him exactly what I was doing and that this should’ve been done a long time ago but no one ever got around to it., Well he didn’t like that. He said that I never asked him for permission and that I can’t just start doing whatever I wanted back there without consulting him first. I then asked him why he even bothered asking us for ideas and telling us we will get around to doing it and not doing anything about it. We brought the discussion into his office and we ended up settling our differences. I told him how we felt in the backroom. It was like we didn’t feel respected or treated fairly by them saying they like our ideas and such but then just ignoring them hoping we would forget. He said that he was sorry and that his boss has kept him really busy lately with her work that she is supposed to be responsible for. He has been stressed out because of that but after that conversation; we have not had a problem since then.
I think there are many workers out there who might not even have said anything to their manager at all about it. But this just goes to show you that by talking to each other and working things out, it can really change your relationship with the people you’re working with and the “backroom culture”. This is where Richard S Lazarus’s positive and negative emotions come into play. Before I talked to my manager to straighten thing out, I had negative emotions towards him and the workplace such as anger, sadness, envy etc. But after talking to him I have had positive emotions such as relief that the bad vibe is over, pride in my job and happiness that everything is finally worked out. I think that the Golem effect could have very well applied to my experiences too. The Golem effect is a loss in performances resulting from low leader expectations.
For instance, because he said I did not ask him for permission to do the bulk racking he might have wondered