The Impact of Self-esteem on Relationships at the Workplace.
Gideon (T.I.G) Ebute-Iwa
High Self-Esteem Coach | Public Speaker | I help individuals build confidence, self-worth, and high self-esteem through personalized coaching and empowering strategies.
One of the fundamental basis for achieving organisation goals is teamwork and interpersonal relationships is a core necessity for a team to excellently and constantly meet expectations to fulfil organizational goals.
The absence of cohesion within and between teams in the organisation due to bad interpersonal relationships will not only make it difficult for the organisation to achieve results but will also hinder the proper progression of the organization’s vision and mission both in the short and long term.
Andrew Carnegie described teamwork as the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results and it’s the fuel that sponsors the ability to work together towards a common vision.
A tight bond, a supportive core and a respectful close knitted association are key ingredients for the progress of an organisation. Henry Ford said that coming together is a beginning, keeping together is a process and working together is a success, while he also opined that, alone we can do little and together we can do much.
The hose that supplies teamwork, which is the fuel that allows common people to attain the uncommon result according to Andrew Carnegie can be cut off by the prevalence of low self-esteem within the team – a team member or two suffering from low self-esteem would cause a disconnection in the hose that supplies the fuel that powers proper teamwork.
Only this article cannot do appropriate justice to the impact of self-esteem in the workplace but will allow us to examine the inevitable outcome of self-esteem on the team by looking at the characteristics of high self-esteem.
The two most important characteristics of high self-esteem are that the person believes that he is inherently competent and that she’s deserving of respect – with high self-esteem, a team member will likely pull her weight both in learning and delivering towards the team goals, being active and taking initiative because she believes she is inherently competent, even in the face of daunting challenges.
More importantly, when a team member believes she’s worthy of respect, she will carry herself with respect and treat other members of the team with respect, one of the effects of low self-esteem is that people in a team carry themselves with less respect and more jealousy towards other people on the team – the amount of benevolence a team member will extend to other members of the team is directly tied to how they see themselves which is the product of the level of their self-esteem.
Trust is another ingredient generated through competence and a proper self-estimate – the best teams and interpersonal relationships that make up the teams run on trust.
When a member of the team doesn’t believe that she is a competent person, she’ll hardly trust her judgment and will always second-guess other people on the team which will lead to unnecessary bottlenecks for the team to properly synergize.
When you doubt yourself, you will doubt other people and no team can thrive on distrust as trust is an important tool to build bonds that can sustain a team to work together towards the same vision.
The ability and the willingness to initiate and engage in meaningful conversation as a tool for proper communication and clarification within the team to foster relationships is always subject to how competent a person feels and how much respect they think they deserve – a person suffering from low self-esteem will mostly avoid confrontations because they don’t believe they have what it takes to foster useful conversation – this is the foundation of backstabbing and when a person on the team does not believe they deserve or get as much respect as the other person, jealousy sets in and combined with backstabbing becomes a destructive locust that eats the team from within.
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Low self-esteem is an anti-relationship and anti-teamwork and the failure of an organisation to address this through policies that encourage and foster high self-esteem in employees will lead to the waste of resources trying to make teams work together instead of enhancing them in getting results that move the organisation closer to her goals.
When someone suffers from low self-esteem, they’re characterized by the lack of belief that they’re competent which immediately makes them an extra burden to the team, this will negatively impact the way the team sees and relate with them and how they see and relate with other personnel on the team.
Secondly, they lack the belief that they deserve respect, which informs how they relate to other people.
In his interview with Networking Magazine in 1991; Nathaniel Branden submitted that self-esteem is not an emotional luxury but a survival requirement that is needed in the workplace.
With the advent of remote work and organisations requiring employees that can work with little or no supervision, high self-esteem is a core tool that organisations must build in their employees.
High self-esteem plays a big role in our ability to take risks, learn new skills, be creative, take feedback and deal with others fairly and benevolently – these are qualities necessary to sustain relationships and teamwork in the workplace.
Without personnel with high self-esteem which sponsors the innate belief of competence and worthiness, an organisation will suffer in the process of achieving its vision, this is why it is important to prioritize policies that can help employees build better self-esteem in the process of their work within and outside of the organisation.