The conflict now also becomes visible to others. Whether family members, colleagues, the supervisory board, or the press – I am approached from various sides about this conflict. At this point, however, I am already so convinced that it is right that I no longer want to listen to these warnings. I don’t have the time or energy for these conversations. I only talk to people who understand me. I stay away from these complainers and critics. The people around me have to decide whether they are a friend and supporter or an enemy and against me. In business and politics, I bring the yes-men into my core team. We support each other, and as time passes, we feel strength and imminent victory. We make fun of the other side and develop an excellent group feeling. We are strong and believe in ourselves. It’s time for stage 7.
Further reading friend or foe:
‘Yes man behavior’ in organizations: In his analysis, Prendergast (1993) examines a specific agency dilemma where the agent puts in effort to monitor a variable that is important to the principal. The principal also gets a signal regarding this variable, and the agent receives information about the principal’s signal. Results demonstrate that the agent manipulates his report to align more closely with the principal’s signal, resulting in biased reporting which leads to a decrease in overall efficiency.1
Friends or foe in politics: In politics, especially in international relations, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to selecting friends and enemies.2 Three levels of amity and enmity can be defined:
- Alliance: generally refers to defense-related cooperation formalized with a treaty (mutual defense agreement or multilateral defense alliance, such as NATO).
- Strategic partnership: Usually less formal than an alliance, a strategic partnership underlines cooperation between states that share common objectives. It may include various topics such as defense, trade, economy, and technology.
- Friendship: mainly used as a symbolic title, the ‘friendship’ expression indicates higher proximity between two governments. As highly informal, the friendship status is, nonetheless, unstable as it may quickly change through domestic political or contextual shifts.
Relationship between states: The relationship between states can be based on historical (or rewritten history), ideological, economic, or transactional grounds. In the current international landscape, which tends toward multipolarity, transaction-based alliances have become more the norm than the exception. Contrary to the traditional understanding of alliances, transactional alliances are “informal alliances of convenience delimited by a context and its timeline”.3 In that sense, two states can be allies in a specific conflict and opponents in another one at the same time. It is also important to note that transactional-based relationships can also occur within one group, a government for example, to ensure loyalty and domestic support.3-6
References:
1 Prendergast, C. 1993. A theory of” yes men”. The American Economic Review, 757–770.
2 Tyushka, A & Czechowska, L. 2019. Chapter 1: Strategic partnerships, international politics and IR theory. In States, International Organizations and Strategic Partnerships. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. 8–43.
3 Tank, P. 2022. Transactional alliances. The Peace Research Institute Oslo. Online.
4 Campos, L. P. 2014. A transactional analytic view of war and peace. Transactional Analysis Journal, 44(1): 68–79.
5 Krebs R. 2004. The worst of enemies, the best of allies, International Studies Review. 6(3): 496–498.
6 Haas, M. L. 2021. When do ideological enemies ally?. International Security. 46 (1): 104–146.
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