What does lack of control do?
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
As we discussed earlier in this chapter, our own stress response is one of the signals that tells us that we are in danger. When we feel threatened, we look for the threat. If our attempts to identify the threat and make it go away fail, we first start to see the people in other departments as the source of the threat, and eventually our own colleagues as well. Fear is not that precise an instrument! In a very real sense, it doesn’t matter if we are physically afraid or afraid of being embarrassed or losing status, the reactions are the same. If anything, our fear of embarrassment or loss of face is often greater than our fear of physical harm!
Thus, when fear takes over, cooperation and teamwork suffer. People start to fight over little things, as they attempt to exert control over something. When we feel out of control, we seek to take control of what we can in whatever ways we can. When we don’t know what to do, we do whatever we can, whether effective or not, whether appropriate or not.
