Skill Sets, Employee Types, and Strategies for Remediation: Analytical and Clinical Considerations for the Workplace

Many disciplines such as human and organizational development, psychology, social psychology, sociology, conflict resolution, psychiatry, and economics have applied their unique perspectives in analyzing and describing workplace dynamics. After all, most humans throughout the world spend the greater part of their days working. When workplace conflict, dissatisfaction, unacceptable productivity, and even homicide occur, naturally solutions are sought. This chapter describes one of the many possible frameworks to explain workplace communication. Observing employee interaction exposes several obvious skills including, trust, collaboration, ego-strength, and communication. Assessing how each employee expresses these skills yields a profile or ideal prototype such as the Workplace Optimizer, the Pressured Employee, and the Low-Level Underperformer. Employee prototypes become the gateway to effective workplace problem resolution. In other words, the combination of skill sets subsumed under the rubric of specific prototypes helps guide human resource professionals and others in their efforts to improve workplace communication, suggest remediation work with specific employees, and ultimately aid in achieving the organization’s mission. The reader is offered practical solutions for working with conflictual and unproductive interaction in the workplace.