Ritual Chair

When an individual’s future might seem ensured, such as a foreseeable position, conflict can be the kiss of death. After all, that is exactly what happened within a Greek-letter organization at Robert Morris University whenever conflict ensued between a chapter’s President and the Ritual Chair. Essentially, when it came time to select the chapter's new Executive Committee for the 2017 calendar year, the Ritual Chair was viewed as many to most likely become the next President as she had become an extremely influential and promising leader. However, having a say in the new positions, the President did everything in her power to ensure the Ritual Chair was not selected to be the next President, but rather saw to it she was appointed to a position
42) - which both played a tremendous role in the overall conflict. After all, whenever the Ritual Chair started being more-so respected than the President, the President became anxious about her position of authority and enabled her anxiety to dictate irrational actions such as going out of her way to make sure the Ritual Chair did not become the next President. Likewise, the President started to deal with aggression as she engaged in displacement tendencies as she directed her aggression toward more vulnerable targets such as yelling at the chapter’s newest members without leadership positions (Folger, Poole, & Stutman, 2013, p. 43). At this point, however, it seems as though the President still needs to better understand her own unconscious motivations and underscores in order for her to gain insight behind the driving forces of her behavior (Folger, Poole, & Stutman, 2013, p.
After all, both the President and the Ritual Chair, being on the Executive Committee, fought for power and attention. Per information found at the Peace Pledge Union’s (n.d.) website, “Conflicts arise when people are competing for the same resources (such as territory, jobs and income, housing), when they aren't fairly distributed, or when there aren't enough to go round” (para. 8). Although they were not competing for physical things, they were competing for authority and influence. Likewise, the Ritual Chair started to resent the President’s leadership style and the overall way that she treated the chapter and “conflicts arise when the people are unhappy with how they are governed” (Peace Pledge Union, n.d., para. 9). Additionally, the Ritual Chair and the President’s basic beliefs about how to run the chapter started to clash and the President began to feel threatened as it later became known to her that her title was almost once