Power Rights and Interest

Power, Rights and InterestsPower, Rights and InterestsFollowing Tina’s insensitive and argumentative attitude that spurred a recent incident in which she made ethnically insensitive comments to a customer making a return, Joe decided to suspend her for three days. Upon her return, Tina became argumentative with Joe and demanded that he remove the suspension from her record as it was unjust and discriminatory. Joe refused to waiver, and told Tina to get back to work.
Tina has gone into this situation with a power-based strategy, being argumentative with her boss and throwing out words such as “discrimination” to intimidate him into removing this situation from her record. By trying to pull a power play on her supervisor, however, she has further damaged the healthy working relationship they used to have. Next, she attempted to appeal based on her rights: by using discrimination or the fact that other employees were not punished in the same way that she was for what she perceived to be similar behavior, she threatened to bring forth a suit for discrimination. Finally, she looked to make it about her interests, as she stated she was having family problems and started crying. When demands and threats were not met, she tried to use her emotions to win Joe over.
Joe, in response to Tina’s approach, has clearly felt threatened and therefore lost his usual calm, rational behavior and responded with a power-based approach. This has also done nothing to help the situation, as now both employees are on the offensive. He is resentful of her accusations and her attempt to sway him with demands, threats, and emotions. His resentfulness has led him away from his usual demeanor and caused him to come across as insensitive and play back with a power-based reaction stating that Tina is lucky to have her job at all.
While this is definitely a delicate situation, certain things stick out to me. First, Tina’s behavior is uncalled for. Clearly, her behavior has been