When I worked for my step grandfather’s contracting company one summer in between my sophomore and junior year of high school, I got into a conflict with the members of the group that I had to work with during the first week I worked for the company. The conflict started an hour after I got to the job site. I asked for help because I did not know what to do on certain tasks and they did not help me. When I asked why they wouldn’t help me, they said that it was because I was the grandson of their boss that I should know what I’m doing when I didn’t.
I explained to the men that I was working with that I had no idea what I was doing because I had never worked on a job site before. They still did not believe me, so I talked to my grandfather and told him what was going on. He listened to me and he said that he would talk to the guys in charge at the job site that I was working at. He told them that I had no experience and they listened to him and started to help me figure out what I had to do. So over the next few weeks, as I continued working for my grandfather if I had a question on what to do when I asked a question they would explain to me what I had to do and if I still did not understand them, they would show me what to do.
After figuring out what to do in my job I became friends with the men I was working with. The article “Workplace Relations: Friendship Patterns and Consequences (According to Managers)”[1] goes into detail about whether or not people who work together should be friends, according to the bosses. The article says “The benefits of workplace friendship further ‘social system models of organizations that emphasize formal and informal, horizontal and vertical interactions open styles of communication and fluid task structures for accomplishment.” This happened to me after I figured out what my job entailed. However, I also found that with some of the other workers, if I asked them a question they would either ignore me or scream at me to go away. The authors state “Organizations can do numerous things to create opportunities for friendship making--although, of course, they cannot force people to become friends.”[2] When we would have a lunch break that would be when they would talk to me if I had other questions, but other than that I would not consider the people who would ignore me to have been my friends.
[1] Evan M. Berman, Jonathan P. West, Maurice N. Richter, Jr. (2002) Workplace Relations: Friendship Patterns and Consequences (According to Managers) Public Administration Review, 2.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0033-3352.00172/pdf
[2] Ibid., 3