Your Attitude Is Showing: A Primer of Human Relations, Tenth Edition

Case 6: Message

The decision to pass Jeff over for the supervisory position is a good one for the following reasons:

1. It would be natural for Jeff’s co-workers to resent him as a supervisor. He failed to build good horizontal working relationships with them when he had the chance. Productivity, under his leadership, could drop substantially.

2. An individual who doesn’t learn how to build good horizontal relationships as an employee will probably have trouble building good vertical relationships as a supervisor. By neglecting his horizontal working relationships when he first joined the department, Jeff made a classic human-relations mistake.

3. A supervisor achieves more departmental productivity by building good relationships than from the work he ...