Micromanagement, credit stealing, bullying: Are you a jerk at work?

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 psychologistTessa 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 whatwould 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? Alot. ”West, who is now 40, is a professor of psychology at New York University, where she runs theWest 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 ...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Work & careers Psychology Guardian Careers Health wellbeing Life and style Source Type: news