Coworker attempts to push their work onto employee, employee refuses to accept it, inciting discord amongst their team: 'My manager is asking if I could be more flexible'

Should we help a coworker simply because they're struggling?

We're told that we should accommodate our coworkers and help them with their work. It's considered being "flexible" or being "a good team player." If you refuse to help out a teammate when they're struggling, you're seen as difficult or inflexible.

This idea is normally encouraged by our bosses, who are eager to keep the metaphorical "eye of Sauron" of upper management off of their department. At any sign of weakness, management will turn every part of their attention and all of their efforts into dissecting every part of the team.

The dissection turns to interrogation, and performance reviews start, then productivity really plummets as everyone's time is spent wading through red tape and trying to keep up appearances of doing work and doing the misguided things that management is telling them to do, rather than getting to the work that is actually important. 

So, with that logic, it's better just not to draw attention to your team at all and have the most knowledgeable and efficient workers prop up the others. This, too, can only go on for so long as those who are dragging the chain now realize they are getting away with it and simply drag it further. Eventually, their teammates are now doing the majority of the work for them and are starting to look around and wonder just when someone is going to set things straight, wondering when they're going to get credit for all the work they have been doing, and beginning to grow increasingly frustrated as they become more burned out.

Meanwhile, everyone is going along thinking that everything is perfectly fine, oblivious to the fact that these few workers have been keeping the entire operation from going belly up.

That's exactly what was happening in this workplace, when this coworker had a habit of "overcommitting" before backing out and attempting to push her entire workload onto her fellow team members. 

This team member found themselves in a catch-22 when, after already being at their wits' end with this team member, the coworker had a legitimate emergency and attempted to push their work off onto the team member again, and the team member refused, citing their own legitimate reasons of already having too high a workload and their own encroaching deadlines to manage.

Exactly as I've already described, the manager turned to asking the team member to be more flexible, and their coworkers turned to calling them "selfish" for refusing to take on more work, leaving them wondering just what they should be doing about the situation they now found themselves in.