She thought that she was being punished for what she thought was her "laziness" earlier during the year. She was suffering from an illness and had to take a significant amount of paid leave, along with all her available sick leave, in order to recover sufficiently to return to work. She perceived the manager as not very understanding of her situation at the time, and was now telling herself that this was the reason for the sudden odd behavior. Regardless of the fact that I attempted to convince her otherwise, she simply did not listen to reason, and let her emotions do the reasoning for her.
The outcome of the situation was that I eventually spoke to the manager to find out what was going on. He explained that upper management informed him of the necessity to retrench people as a result of the difficult economic times. As a result, our manager believed that, if he made people produce more than all the other divisions in the company, his job would be safer. I therefore explained the situation with my fellow employees,...
I told him politely that, if things did not improve, I would have to approach upper management, even if this meant that I would myself face retrenchment. I was then able to make the emotional employee aware of the true situation, while the manager became easier to work with.
One of the most significant challenges I am facing in my leadership today is a tendency towards rationalization when people are unwilling to change behavior that jeopardizes the workplace, such as ethnocentrism or conformity. I find that people who subscribe to such behavior are often comfortable in their belief systems and with their viewpoints, and are unwilling to change. However, I have also found that making them aware of these problems is helpful in beginning to modify the behavior.
Reference
Diestler, S. (2009). Becoming a Critical Thinker: A User Friendly Manual, fifth edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall, 2009.
