Situation · Work
“Our team has turned against the other department”
What could be going on
Team turns tribal: Fits exactly; check how the other team is talked about.
In-group bias: Fits if your team gets more trust and resources in judgement.
Social identity: Fits if team membership has become a big part of how people see themselves.
Basic assumption groups (Bion): Fits if fighting an outside enemy keeps the team from facing its own problems.
Organisational justice: Check whether resources or credit really are shared unfairly.
Dehumanisation: animalistic and mechanistic (Haslam): Fits if the other team is spoken about as stupid, lazy or less than human.
Questions to carry
- When did the talk about the other department start to change, and what had happened then?
- Which joke or comment about them have I laughed along with, and what did it give me?
Also said as
- us versus them at work
- sales and engineering hate each other
- our team only trusts each other and sees everyone else as the enemy
- tribal teams at my company
- our department sees the other team as the enemy
- rivalry between departments at work