How Bedouin culture negatively impacts human resources in Gulf organizations
People's conflict management skills need an upgrade
The Bedouin mindset continues to have a strong influence on the way Gulf citizens behave in the workplace. Many of the effects are negative, including the tendency for people to have primitive conflict management techniques. The result is a destructively high rate of employee turnover, and addressing it requires an overhaul of children’s education.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans are either nomadic or semi-nomadic, meaning that they seldom stay in the same place for a long time. It also means that population densities are traditionally very low because humans depend on hunting and gathering for survival. As a result, if you have a conflict with someone in your roving band, the straightforward solution is for each of you to go your separate ways.
The discovery of farming gave humans an incentive to live for an extended period in the same location, and allowed for significantly higher population densities, eventually paving the way for urban life. This meant that people had to improve their conflict management skills, because upping and leaving when you have a bust-up with your cousin in an urban setting means losing much more than when you are both vagrants.
Bedouins are nomads, and until the last 100 years, the challenges posed by the region’s arid climate have prevented farming and the transition to modern urban life. As a result, the more advanced conflict management skills we have come to take for granted in farming communities never really developed until the 20th century. Consequently, Gulf societies – and the mindsets of Gulf citizens – remain deficient in the conflict management domain.
One of the manifestations of this tendency is the high rate of employee turnover in modern Gulf organizations in the event of peer conflicts. For those of us who have lived and worked in the region for a long time, the following tale is extremely familiar.
An employee has a professional conflict with another colleague, and this disrupts their productivity. Rather than trying to resolve the conflict using the myriad of best practices, the less powerful of the two parties will covertly look for alternative employment, while the conflict continues to simmer and impede work. Then, upon securing a superior job, they will surprise everyone in the organization with a “goodbye forever” email, never to be heard from again.
This highly frequent scenario is damaging in ways that extend beyond the conflict-induced foregone productivity. For managers, the sudden loss of in-house talent can be extremely disruptive, and the process of recruiting a replacement is both time consuming and expensive.
Moreover, since this happens so often, it becomes an additional reason why Gulf managers are reluctant to invest in developing their employees’ skills. They reason to themselves: “Why should I enroll Khalid in the training program? It’s only a matter of time until he butts heads with another colleague over something as trivial as a parking space or seating arrangement, driving him to look for another job, and wiping out my investment. Better to get the best out of him while I can, and leave some other naïve manager to pick up the check for his training.”
The departing employee suffers, too, because the grass is seldom greener in their new job. A new employment opportunity is likely to contribute to your professional growth if you can take your time finding it, and if you can advance professionally in your existing job while you wait. If, however, you are disenchanted and looking for a quick exit because you are enraged at Noor for forgetting to say “Eid Mubarak!”, or because Sabah scoffed at your idea during the group meeting, then the outcome of your job search is likely to be unsatisfactory.
The only viable solution to this quandary is for people in the Gulf to improve upon their woeful conflict management skills, which currently undermine a lot more than their relationships with their professional peers. Siblings, cousins, spouses, and so on continue to fight among themselves over the smallest stakes, seduced by the Bedouin-inspired option of “walking away because that will teach them!”.
A few office workshops would help, but ultimately, school curricula need to be modernized to include conflict management skills, or emotional intelligence more broadly. Unfortunately, this problem is so embedded in our culture that we would need to first teach the teachers how to resolve conflicts effectively, as any school principal in the Gulf would surely attest.
The benefits from this kind of progressive thinking could be extremely wide-ranging, as we would see declines in divorce rates, commercial disputes, disagreements over inheritance, and much more. Alas, making such investments requires a lot of patience and foresight, which is another thing that people with a nomadic mindset do badly on.