Overcoming Resistance

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Explicit + Implicit coercion also took place at this same job. Lets just say that my former job was a job that started out as a summer job when I first graduated high school and then I eventually incorporated it into a full time job that I did in addition to being a full time student at Ohio State. Simply put, many of my co-workers were questionable/shady adults that were in their late 20's to mid 30's. This job paid considerably well in comparison to the other jobs that my co-workers would have been doing if it was not for this job. The employer basically hired these shady people (most of which had bad drug problems) with the expectation that they were to be totally compliant with all policies since they did not require drug tests prior to employment yet it was a supposedly “drug-free” environment. The best example of the employer utilizing their power position was when it came to PRD's (Pay-Roll Deductions). This was a customer service position that required operating a company truck on a day-to-day basis and involved being in and out of customers houses throughout the day. If at any time an employee damaged the company truck or damaged something in a customer's house, the employee was required to pay for the damages out of their own pocket and it was usually deducted from their pay checks.

Eventually, since damages occurred on a relatively frequent basis, the employees protested these deductions in pay and pushed to have the company insurance policies take care of any damages that were to happen on the job. Since damages happened frequently, the employer did not want to turn these costs over to insurance because of the fear that insurance costs would be jacked up significantly after each accident. The employer essentially said fine we will turn these costs over to insurance but employees have to take drug tests after each accident and if they fail, they will be fired. Since most of the employees that were causing these damages were on drugs, they did not dispute this and deductions in pay continued to be issued when accidents took place. Employees put up with this policy because they believed that the overall pay of the job was better than any other job they could obtain, and this gave the employer a lot of power over these employees.

In summary, overcoming resistance is something that all managers/supervisors are tasked with doing in order to continue being a successful company. Some of the approach strategies seem a bit shady but they all are utilized in the workforce today. Some employers tend to adopt the less expensive approach strategies and risk having disgruntled employees. For the company I use to work for, they were able to implement these kind of strategies and were still able to be a successful company. Whether employees were happy or not was of little importance to my former employer and the only thing that was important was whether the jobs were done. To an extent, their approach worked since the company was very profitable, but one would assume that this is a rare occurrence and not many companies that adopt the same strategies would have the same luck.

References

Rue, L.W., & Byars, L.L. (2014). , 11th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Irwin. ISBN: 978-0-07802922-6.