OrgHealth - Negativity, conflict and stress

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Negativity, conflict and stress

Case study

Paul Smith is a director of sales at a large publishing company. The company divides its activities into five divisions, each concentrating on a specific market. The publishing world is facing challenges from the internet age and needs to respond to changes in the needs of the market that is favouring on line communication and electronic books.

Paul S has been with the company for 8 years. He has gradually developed an award winning sales team that has contributed significantly to the profits of the company. His sales team out performed other sales teams, and Paul has benefitted from this in his performance reviews and salary and bonuses. His sales team has also benefitted from their success in similar ways.

About two years ago Paul’s deputy, Alison Jones, went on maternity leave, and after a few weeks, resigned from her position. This exposed Paul as his deputy had effectively been the driving force behind the team, and her absence was clearly felt by everyone. Alison was charismatic at work, engaged with everyone in the team and encouraged them towards high performance.

It didn’t take long, after Alison’s departure, for the team to disintegrate. Paul’s leadership abilities were exposed as confrontational, with a short fuse, in marked contrast with Alison’s behaviour. It became obvious that Alison was able to shield her team from the behaviour of their boss. In-fighting began to break out with the members of the team adopting a highly competitive approach to each other, resulting in various sharp practices, and the emergence of negativity amongst the team. Performance plummeted as the team failed to see what was happening to their market, being focused on internal fighting and taking their individual and collective eyes off the ball. Paul seemed completely unable to deal with this deterioration and became progressively more volatile, culminating in a grievance being taken out against him by a member of the administrative team who had been on the receiving end of some abusive and unnecessary aggression from Paul over a relatively minor administrative matter.

The grievance accentuated an already deteriorating situation which the MD for the division, Gareth Ainsley-Rogerson, could not ignore. One day Gareth, along with Cynthia Perks his HR Advisor, went to see Paul in his office, unannounced. Reports of this meeting differ; on one hand Gareth reports that it was an amiable exchange of views about the current situation, whilst Paul reports that he was humiliated and bullied. The outcome was a referral to Occupational Health, on the pretext that Paul needed to be ‘checked out’ before the grievance hearing could take place, as it was felt by the MD that Paul was acting ‘out of character’. Instead of attending his appointment with an Occupational Health Physician, Paul went to his GP, who had no option but to sign him off sick for 6 weeks with stress.

Cynthia Perks has no idea what to do next. The MD has no idea how to take charge of the disintegrated sales team, although he was minded to put someone else in charge as an interim measure until the mess was sorted out; but he failed to find anyone willing to take on the job.