It is called 'gamesmanship' and is designed to undermine the Individual, to force them into accepting the same values as everybody else.
My experiences of the workplace have been uniformly negative and although most of the jobs have been nasty, the real unpleasantness was at the "human interface", ie where 'team members' were expending considerable effort and energy in undermining each other and idiotic point-scoring excercises.
Management help the divisions along by favouritising some staff members at the expense of others and all too frequently, lead the charge against the 'outsider'.
In the last job I had, the Manager had such a generalised dislike towards every human being who was even slightly different to how he thought they should be that he evolved a 'round robin' system of persecution, which means that he would arbitrarily single somebody out for victimisation on a per-shift basis. Not everybody was in the sub-group for this treatment, there were those who were exempt, for example fellow bullies. The Manager took pride in being able to 'get rid of' people he didn't like and the environment was his little fiefedom. Exposure to such an environment is damaging because it erodes your belief that you can do anything and makes it easier to manipulate and control you. I have never been able to 'get' why some people do that, even though I have it worked out at an intellectual level, I don't know how to immunise myself from the effects of it.
Some people responded to this abuse by trying to appease and ingratiate, in order to try to 'change things from within', though I reacted by getting gradually more and more stressed and unhappy and more and more marginalised. I eventually got 'fired' illegally, due to the pressure building up so much.
31 May 2005, 9:42 pm
