Role Conflict

Page 201

Imagine that you work at a local retail store and you’ve been promoted to store manager. As part of your new role, you will have to manage staff members who are working as individual contributors at the store. Several of them are also your close friends, and you all used to be at the same level in the store.

Role conflict arises in a group whenever expectations for a member’s behavior are incompatible. The roles of manager and friend are inherently in conflict. After all, as a manager, you’ll have to evaluate staff members’ performance. And how can you give a good friend a poor performance review and still remain friends?

As you might imagine, role conflict can make group communication profoundly challenging, and there are no easy answers to this kind of dilemma. In the case of the retail store, you might decide not to give your friend a negative review in the interest of saving the friendship. Or perhaps you’ll decide to give candid constructive feedback to your friend on his performance. But you’ll try to constrain the damage to your friendship by saying something like “I hope you know I’m offering this feedback as a way to help you improve. As your friend and manager, I want to see you do well here.”