05.08.10 The 8th Managerial Flaw that Encourages Negative Gossip : Failing to Manage Work Cliques

Failing to Manage Work Cliques

A ‘work clique’ is a tightly knit group of people drawn together by shared experiences, interests, feelings, performance and so forth. Usually, the cliques are exclusive.

Much as there could be several positives associated with cliques, their rumour-mongering tendency is a common downside which, if neglected by management, can propagate negative gossip.

In the case of Aaron and the golden calf saga; and although the bible is silent about how the gossip would have spread through a camp of over six-hundred thousand men plus women and children, the fact is that the rumour circulated to the extent that almost everyone, apart from the Levites, seems to have been convinced that Moses would not return. I would like to guess that cliques had a major hand in publicising that gossip; and that Aaron and his team of supervisors failed to manage those cliques to the point of being enticed to conform to public opinion.

Looking at our JuaLink story, you may have observed that one of the challenges was the supervisors’ failure to manage Lulu’s gossip clique. A few examples are worth mentioning. For starters, the superiors would create room for the clique to blossom by allowing the lunch hour fellowship to continue, even when they were fully aware that a sizeable number of the prayer partners were members of the notorious clique. Moreover, the supervisors knew how the clique’srampant gossipmongers had dampened JuaLink’s productivity since most members would spend time on rumours rather than working. The supervisors were also fully aware of the clique’s powerful influence in that a significant percentage of the employees would believe anything that the group conveyed, for example, the rumour that the company had been sold and that all employees would soon be jobless. This was accentuated by the fact that the head of human resource, Obed, was an active member of that clique. In all that, the supervisors, right from board level going down, would just ‘look on’ as the clique continued to toxically disseminate dirty rumours back and forth in JuaLink’s corridors.