Personal Conflicts

Conflict is one of the most effective reason that cause to politics. It is unavoidable to have conflicts between colleagues on different opinions and ideas, authority, or others and people start to gossip. Conflict is known as "a struggle over values or claims to status, power and scare resources in which claims of the conflicting parties are not only to gain the desired valuable, but also to neutralize, injure, or eliminate their rivals". 

Someone who is pursuing power and self-interest through conflicts would not only gain what they want but also hurt the people who are on the other side. Conflicts are usually formed in: individual versus individual, individual versus group, group versus group or competition.

Personal relationship between colleagues and subordinators may cause into conflict.  This is because every person different in education, background, personal value system, experience and what training mode they had before. 

For example, our friends might be our colleagues, if there is some mistakes of their work, should us point them out? Some may answer yes and some may answer no. Why? Because they are our good friends and some of them cannot separate work and personal life well. What we have done will affect our relationship between us. Or in other case, we are the leader of a team in a company; our good friends are our team member. They may suspect us treat them better than others or we may not criticize them when they done something flawless.

 To be sure, a team of good friends may work productively, but the precondition is all of us could separate work and personal life as well. Contradiction might not only occur in between good friends but also to the other colleagues that not so close. Over time, contradiction between colleagues will appear and finally lead to office politics.