Why Do Coworkers End Up Fighting? Because the Company Won’t Take Responsibility

3:40 p.m. Another message popped up in the corner of my monitor. Beside the stack of papers I still hadn’t touched sat the coffee I had bought after lunch. Warm now, like me. I pushed it aside and opened the chat. It was someone from another department.

"Please check this—we need to get this done."

No greeting, no explanation, no deadline. Just one attachment. Why am I supposed to check this? Are they asking me to review it, or do it for them? I’d taken something like this once last month, and maybe that was the beginning of it. If I wrote, "This doesn’t really look like our side’s job," would I just come off as difficult? In the end, I opened the file. No one had ever clearly said this was mine.

The funny part is that the other side is probably dealing with the same thing. From their desk, they’re waiting for a reply and thinking, "What, they can’t even help with this?" And here I am thinking, "There they go, dumping it on me again." Two people on the same company, the same floor, using the same coffee machine, spending the afternoon resenting each other. Where did things go wrong so badly that this keeps happening every week?

To be honest, this isn’t really a fight over who’s more sensitive. Most people aren’t trying to dump work on purpose, and most people aren’t refusing it on purpose either. And yet the conflict keeps happening because the boundaries are blurry, and where those boundaries should be, responsibility is missing.

From the requester’s point of view, the work clearly belongs to the other side. Their own task can’t be finished until it passes through that team, so getting help from them feels like normal cooperation. But from the receiver’s point of view, it clearly belongs to that department. A task that shows up in my chat with one line is not cooperation; it feels like a handoff. Both sides make sense from where they’re sitting. That’s why it doesn’t get resolved. Neither side is wrong, which means someone else needs to draw the line—but there is no one there to do it.

The truth is, work in a company isn’t neatly cut into pieces. Some tasks only finish when two teams work on them together. Some only move forward after one step is done. So the more work piles up, the more you need a clear line: who handles what, and where the shared part begins. But a lot of companies never draw that line. Not because they can’t, but because they can’t be bothered. Drawing the line means someone has to call a meeting, and someone has to accept that their team’s workload might change. There’s no one above willing to take on that discomfort.

What makes it worse is what happens next. When there’s no line, work gets tangled up, and when work gets tangled up, people get tired first. At first it’s just annoying. Then something gets delayed once, handed off once, ignored once without a reply, and after that you stop seeing the task and start seeing the person. The moment "Please check this" gets translated into "Does this person think I’m a joke?" the work is already half broken. After that, you start judging the same request by the sender’s name, and that judgment eats away at the relationship too.

In a small company, it shows even more plainly. Work moves around depending on who talks loudest, and the old-timer who’s been here forever can have more power than any policy. Boundaries get set by friendships and seniority instead of documents. Convenient, isn’t it? Except the bill for that convenience always lands on the desk of the people who are actually responsible and actually trying.

From the top, it may look like nothing serious is wrong. The work gets done somehow, and people adjust on their own. But if you look at what that "on their own" really means, the same face keeps showing up. The person who was responsible enough to take it once becomes the person who always has to take it. The person who learned to dodge things starts flinching the moment anyone asks them for anything. And before long, the organization runs not on fair rules, but on squeezing the person who can least say no until they quit. When a company won’t do its part, employees end up learning survival before collaboration. To keep a paycheck and survive here, you learn that acting like common sense is not the same as getting by.

So if one message makes your blood boil, it’s not because you’re too small-minded. It’s because you’re stuck in a situation where nobody has decided whose job it is, and you’re the one who has to sort it out every single time. Of course that’s exhausting.

A company like this doesn’t fix itself. There won’t be a fresh responsibility chart next Monday, and the other department head isn’t about to say, "We’ll take it from here." While you wait, the messages keep coming. So the only thing you can do is start with what you can control on your side.

First, write down where your job actually ends. It doesn’t have to be some grand document. Even a note in your phone or a page in a notebook split into "things I own all the way," "things I can help with," and "things that aren’t mine" can make your head a little quieter the next time a request comes in. People without a standard have to rethink everything from scratch, and by the time they’re tired enough, they just take it anyway. There’s a big difference between taking something because you’ve decided to, and taking it because your own boundaries have gone soft and someone else has pulled you along.

You don’t have to say no harshly. If you do it badly, and that person happens to be an old-timer or someone with a lot of influence, they can use all their politics and pull to push you down. That becomes a fight you can’t really win, and the longer it goes on, the more they’ll make your life miserable until you can’t keep taking it. They may even work the politics upward so that your own manager tells you directly, "Just do it." So when you refuse, it’s better to stay calm and make the boundary clear.

"I can look at it up to this point, but I think the rest goes beyond my scope."

"If you check with our team lead first, this will probably move faster. It’s not something I can decide on my own."

That isn’t a fight. It’s a way of showing where your part ends so the other person can hear it too. Once you draw that line, it becomes the standard for the next request.

And don’t just say it—leave a trail too. In chat or email, send a quick note like, "I checked up to ○○, and it looks like △△ still needs your team’s review." If things go wrong later, the thing that helps you remember who did what is not memory. It’s that one line. The thing protecting you doesn’t need to be dramatic. A date and a scope are enough. Keep the record.

Of course, there are places where even that won’t work. Places where the next review changes because you refused, or where your manager wipes out every boundary with a casual "Just help out." If that’s the kind of place you’re in, pushing harder only gets you hurt. In that case, don’t try to win. At minimum, keep track of what you took on. You may not be able to hold the line, but you can still leave a record of where it broke. That becomes evidence later, when you decide whether to keep staying in that seat.

Every time something gets tangled, some people rewind the tape and wonder if they should’ve been a little smarter about how they took it. Usually, those are the people carrying the most. But when an organization has no boundaries to begin with, things don’t fall apart because someone lacked finesse. They fall apart because nobody cleaned it up. That means the company is full of people who won’t take responsibility. If I couldn’t absorb everything, that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with my personality. I was just standing in the gap where the system failed to do its job.

And the person on the other side of the chat may be in the same spot as me. Of course, a lot of people are just shamelessly pushing work around, but not always. They may have been handed something from above and, not knowing where else to send it, fired off one line to the person they thought would be easiest to reach. That doesn’t mean I have to take it on. Still, knowing that doesn’t require me to dump all my resentment on their face. Just that much makes the afternoon feel a little less bitter.

Then how do you tell what kind of company you’ve just joined? As I mentioned earlier, check whether there’s a job description. And look for a written approval policy that shows who signs off on what and who is responsible for each task.

If those two things exist, they give you some 기준 when conflict comes up, and discussion becomes possible. But if you’ve joined a company and those standards don’t exist, the things I’ve been talking about will happen for sure.

The thing about organizational culture is that it doesn’t change easily. Sometimes a bad culture stays in place until the company shuts down. If you see signs of that, focus on building your own career day by day, strengthen your defenses as much as you can, and look for a company with a proper system. Don’t keep sacrificing yourself because "that’s just how it is" or "there’s no one else to do it." No one will be grateful for that sacrifice. Turn the tasks you had no choice but to take on into experience, add them to your resume one line at a time, and start looking for a new workplace with an actual system.