PAA assignment
Concrete experience
I worked for a property company (MJO) during the summer of 2013 for almost three months. MJO is a property company that builds both condotels and hotels in Indonesia. At the time, our work involved selling condotels in Bali, Indonesia. A condotel is a combination of a condo and a hotel. A condotel allows buyers to purchase real estate and rent out the condotel if they are not using it. This way, the condotel is a good source of money for the property owners because they still make money, even when the owner is not using the property. At MJO, every project has their marketing team. The rules for this company were somewhat different than other companies. The boss didn’t give the workers any pay, however, if we didn’t meet the company’s selling target that was already assigned to us we had to pay the penalty fees. Many people might think that the penalty fees were not a big problem. However, the workers who only had the marketing job at MJO felt a big loss when they had to pay. At that time, MJO’s condotel projects had seven different marketing teams. The marketing teams were very competitive among each other because our boss didn’t give us any pay. They only gave us a commission for selling the condotel. The teams did not care about each other. There were not any conversations between the teams. Each of the teams were only trying their best to sell the condotel no matter what methods they had to use to get the customer; even if it could harm other teams. Last time, my team decided to work as a partner with one of the other teams. We became closer with each other after every meeting. One day, we decided to make a promotion in one of the biggest malls in Jakarta. However, when we wanted to rent the place inside the mall, our partner that we had trusted so much backstabbed us. They booked the place first with the other group. This incident brought my group’s motivation and morale down. The feeling of being stabbed by someone that we believed so much is too hard to explain. I felt that I wanted to slap them so badly. My hands were shaking every time I saw their team members’ faces. My team members and I were extremely shocked at that time. It was also very frustrating for me and my team to continue working at MJO because the work environment was not good. I felt like the MJO workplace was full of haters because there were too many rivals in one place.
Reflective Observation
At that time, I was out of control. I could not control my emotions every time I saw the other team’s people. On one side, I was scared that other people would do the same thing to us but on the other side, it made me really stressed out. This stress occurred because I was working in a place that made me feel uncomfortable. I could not forgive those people that backstabbed me. It was not because I didn’t get any customers. It didn’t matter to me if I didn’t get any sales and commission, as I had joined the company only to have new experiences. It was because I felt pity for my teammates. They worked so hard to make a living, and some had also married. As time has passed, I think I am becoming more mature as I have experienced a lot of other events recently. Now I can forgive them. I feel like they backstabbed us for one reason: to get the money to survive. I think that it is pretty normal for them to backstab us as they are also under pressure to reach their sales target. I believe that it is human nature to do whatever they can to avoid any problems or to save their lives. In this case, they wanted to avoid the penalty fees. From this incident, I think I learned an extremely important lesson: Money is everything for some people. Money can control and change people. It taught me that in the business world, we are not allowed to trust people a hundred percent because we don’t know what will happen and what they can do to us in the future.
Abstract Conceptualization
Conflict is the best word that described what happened at MJO’s office. According to the textbook page 305, conflict is "a form of interaction among parties that differ in interests, perceptions, and preferences". Many people’s opinions, ideas and goals conflicted with each other and resulted in a not-good environment in the office, and it affected the company.
The constant conflict that keeps happening in the company forms another problem, stereotypes. Stereotypes happened to a lot of the marketing people in the company. "The combination of negative stereotypes, distrust, internal militance, and aggressive action creates a vicious cycle: 'defensive' aggression by one group validates suspicion and 'defensive' counter aggression by the other, and the conflict escalates (Deutsch, 1973) unless it is counteracted by external factors" (reader, p. 307). This cycle is exactly what happened to me. Although only one group backstabbed me, I became very cautious and suspicious with other group, because I was expecting the same problem to happen with what the first team did to me. This experience made me have bad and negative thoughts for the other people in the office including my teammates. I could not think clearly at that time. I believe that all of this happened because of one reason: No one controlled us. According to Brown on page 306, “managers must intervene when conflict is happening”. I was not sure if the manager knew if there were a conflict and problems among the teams. However, if you are a manager, you still need to communicate and discuss problems with your workers. You cannot just leave them on their own. As such, it seemed like the managers only wanted the money.
Active Experimentation
Even though, it was a bad experience to be working at MJO, I still want to thank MJO for a lot because I learned a lot of lessons. This experience taught me not to trust other people completely. It also made me stop relying on other people. If you want to do it right, you need to do it yourself but if you cannot do it, you can ask for some help. I also learned that communication is one of the extremely important factors in a company in order for the company to be successful. I believe all of this was happening because there was no communication between the people inside the workplace. It made the people see other people as an enemy at MJO, not as co-workers anymore. Communication and discussing problems within all the teams are very important. I also learned that the boss needs to give salaries. Otherwise there will be a conflict in the company. At MJO, because of no salaries, all the people were suffering. All the marketing people in the company only thought about getting customers. We could not blame the marketing people if they did something bad to their co-workers because they did this in order to fulfill the company’s sales target. If I were in this kind of situation again, first I would talk to the other teams and become friends with them. I would also talk to the managers about the problems that are currently occurring in the marketing department. Last, I would try to talk to the boss about the salary problem. I do not care if I get fired from the company; I just want the people that work almost the whole day and suffer with me to be happy and to lighten their burden.
