Office Politics

In an office environment, I can see a lot of corporate act, what I meant is not those corporate governance or legislations, but the “Act” that each and every of my colleagues portrayed in the office. Office politics is unavoidable and it happens everywhere. Colleagues in the same department backstab each other, people who like to act smart and hardworking in front of bosses or big shots in order to climb up the corporate ladder, shooting arrows (means pushing blames and responsibilities to each other when some issues crop up) and the worst thing you don’t even know who is treating you sincerely as a friend in the office. Of course no doubt that out of 10 colleagues, there might be one or two who are nice ones, but I think it’s very very rare. I often heard people saying to me "Don't trust people easily in the office, you won't know who is going to backstab you any moment." Somewhat this is true cause I experienced this before and because of this, I learnt to be somewhat 'smart' in handling my colleagues. For example, smile and be nice even to the people that I hate to the core in office or agree with whatever they said even though I find their arguments are ridiculous because I dont want to face the risk of them gossip or talk behind my back. Sometimes, I find myself very contradicting and hate the way I behave sometimes.

Today one of my best friends who works in an engineering company as an accountant shared her work frustrations with me. This is what she said “I buay song the ppl here.. and they also buay song me la.. and i really dont understand the few of them.. rather use the normal working hour to sleep and msning.. and then stay back to do OT.. and so love to ‘por’ each other.. treat each other so good but last time still tell me bad things about each other ”….

Before that, she was a happy go lucky girl who excel in her studies during her university days and was awarded first class honour student recently. However, ever since she joined the working world, everything has changed. She felt lonely in her company, felt sick to come to work and even thinking of taking fake MCs once a month. She was demoralized and lonely because her colleagues would usually ignored or treat her as if she's invisible and gave her a ‘not so friendly treatment’. Her colleagues also often hold gatherings or any birthday/farewell/welcome party without her. Her boss is not supportive and even commented that she finds my friend to be self-centered. And this lead to her having the urge of having tattoo or having her ear pierced because she claimed that these will give her POWER and she will feel more confident. She is hopeless and doesn’t know how to overcome these problems. And because of the situation she is facing at work right now, she started to have self-perception of herself. She started to think that maybe she's not friendly enough or didnt make an extra effort to gel with them. She also started to think that she's a weirdo and often told us that sometimes she wishes to disappear from this world and often 'cursing' herself to get some kind of illness so that she doesn't need to come to work. This lead to low self-esteem and low self-confidence in herself. Self-perception theory (Bem, 1972) proposes that individuals come to "know" their own attitudes and other internal states partially by inferring them from observation of their own overt behaviour. This is what my friend did.

I understand it's painful to be in this kind of situation but to make things better since my friend needs the job badly, she should try to be more open up with her colleagues and supervisor. Discuss the problem she is facing right now and try to find solutions to solve these problems instead of thinking of those negative things as this is really affecting her badly. She can engage more in the activities that she likes to make herself more relax and happy.

According to self-determination theory by Deci & Ryan (1985), it is a person's innate needs for competence, autonomy and relateness. This is what's happening to me and my supervisor. Recently, I'm in charge of a major initiatives which I feel I am competent and up to the task and that initiative is something that interest me as well. However, my supervisor is really getting on my nerves. She wants to meet me weekly for review to have updates on what I plan to do and how am I going to perform the task. I am already so busy with my BAU ( Business as Usual) work and yet she wants to spend two hour weekly with me to talk on the things that I need some time to work on it. She should let me do it independently with her guidance of course but not have total control of it. She even wants to scan through the email that I'm going to send. As the result, I am not motivated at all and felt like a student reporting to the discipline teacher.