Family Psychodynamics in Organizational Contexts

The Hidden Forces that Shape the Workplace

Steen Visholm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000381702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industrial Management
• Index: Business

This fascinating book shows how an understanding of the psychodynamics of the extended family, from parental relations to sibling rivalries, can provide insight into many of the key issues faced by organizations today.

Covering topics such as change management, creativity, autonomous groups, leadership and democracy, it shows how deep-rooted family dynamics unconsciously frame the way we relate to each other in the workplace, and how they can have a profound influence on the broader trajectory of organizations.

This book features:

• Examples on how to use the extended family as a framework for understanding organizational behaviour.
• A look beyond parental relationships to discuss sibling relationships as well.
• Examples to illustrate key topics of practical relevance to consultants and managers.

Family Psychodynamics in Organizational Contexts is an important read for students and scholars of organizational psychology, organizational studies and psychodynamics, as well as consultants and coaches working in organizational contexts.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Connections between family and organization

This book deals with open and hidden family dynamics in organizations – a topic in organizational psychology. Through theory and examples, the book demonstrates how an understanding informed by family dynamics can often explain phenomena in organizations that may at first glance seem strange or meaningless and which are a drain on the organization’s time and energy.

The family is a system of individuals in relationships that have been established through sexual reproduction. This relational system contains a number of positions: mother, father, daughter, sister, brother, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, great-grandfather, cousin, second cousin, great-uncle, aunt and so forth. A person may simultaneously occupy several positions in the systems: a father is also a son; he may be a maternal grandfather and so forth. Inheritance laws describe this in specific detail.

Like other social systems, the family has one primary task. The family’s primary task, according to Shapiro (1988), is to facilitate age-appropriate development for all the members. Families also have an inherent timeline: falling in love, moving in together, pregnancy, first child, second child, subsequent children, juvenile crisis often simultaneous with parents mid-life crisis, generational change, children leaving home and starting the cycle over again as the parents figure out what to do until the grandchildren show up. Shifts in the family members’ roles are driven by this timeline. The open family dynamics play out in organizations where an actual family is in charge of management or otherwise plays a significant role.

The organization’s hidden family dynamics work via transferences, an important concept in psychoanalysis. Life events that we find ourselves unable to deal with, for one reason or another, are repressed, meaning that our memory of the event is severed from the language it might be told in. However, the repressed material returns. Unconsciously, we seek to repeat the repressed scene in real-life situations that are somehow reminiscent of the original scene. A supervisor addresses us in a particular tone of voice, a repressed memory of a stern father is activated, and the supervisor is perceived the same way we perceived our father. The repressed memory of the father is transferred onto the supervisor. The supervisor has no idea why the employee is so upset. The employee’s behaviour makes no sense in the current situation. Only by tracing the current scene back to the original situation can we hope to make sense of the behaviour.

There is nothing new about viewing life in the organization through the lens of family dynamics. The new contribution of the current effort lies in applying an expanded understanding of family dynamics on organizations. The transference of parental figures onto leaders and managers has been described many times. The Oedipus complex, with its father-mother-son triangle, is a widely used model. In the early 2000s, however, a growing number of psychoanalytic books appeared that addressed sibling relationships (Mitchell, 2003; Coles, 2003, Lewin & Sharp, 2009).

In 2004, I was able to draw on some of this literature in connection with a consultancy project on self-managing teams in industry (Visholm, 2005c, 2005d 2006a, 2011c). I found the added nuance and the broadening of the psychoanalytic lens that comes from expanding a triangle into a more complex figure profoundly inspiring.

On a more general level, this book is situated within the paradigm of systems psychodynamics (Gould et al., 2001; Heinskou & Visholm, 2004, 2011; Bonnerup & Hasselager, 2008; Beck, 2009; Lading & Jørgensen, 2010). Systems psychodynamics combines the psychoanalytic approach with open systems theory. Not everyone working within this paradigm views family dynamics as central. This book argues that family dynamics offer a rewarding perspective.

In this introductory chapter I seek to explain why family dynamics can provide a fruitful and necessary contribution to group and organizational psychology.

I Connections between family and organization

Ever since the emergence of the modern notion of civil society in the late 18th century, family and work have been regarded as separate and virtually opposite phenomena. However, this dichotomy blurs a number of similarities and connections between families and workplace organizations, and a closer study would improve our understanding of both.

During many previous historical periods – not least during the Middle Ages, when people lived in so-called traditional societies – family and organization were one and the same. Work and family life unfolded within a single ‘sociotope’. Within the framework defined by squires and other high-ranking figures, the father was the head of both the family and the enterprise, whether the latter was a farm or a smithy. The eldest son and his wife would presumably take over when the parents retired. The parents decided who would take over and when, whom the children could marry, what sort of training they would get and what trade they would take on if they were not destined to take over the family enterprise.

The generational change and the issue of inheritance were hugely important for both generations, as illustrated in myths, fairy tales, art and literature. Generational change and inheritance also define the situation that constitutes the climax of many of these stories: the proposal and the wedding, which mark the start of a new generation. The phrase ‘and they lived happily ever after’ is a way of concluding the story that should probably be read less an idyllic vision and more as an indication that ‘what happened next is another story’.

In modern welfare society, state and market have interjected themselves in between the generations, to some extent replacing their mutual interdependence, in part, with freedom and, in part, with a new dependence on the state and the market. The parents no longer decide who marries whom or what sort of training the young person gets. As individual citizens, we decide who we want to date, have sex with and raise a family with – to the extent our desires match our intended partner’s desires. In the same way we decide what training to pursue – to the extent that we meet the given criteria and pass the requisite tests and exams. Thus, our reliance on local and family ties has been replaced with ‘societalization’. In modern society, the date of our birth is more significant than the family we are born into. We develop shared experiences with same-age peers, enter the labour market alongside them – into a feverishly inflated bubble economy or into a recession – or are perhaps unfortunate enough to be sent to fight a war, where young men of a certain age span are decimated at the front (Manheim, 1993). Today, there is little talk of generational change in most families, although certain patterns can be observed with regard to who gets or claims the honour of hosting the extended family for Christmas. Today, the generational concept is mostly used to characterize a segment of youth of a certain decade with shared tastes in music and fashion, political outlook and so forth: the flappers of the 1920s, the hippies of the 1960s, Generation X and so forth.

Men and women are now equal, in principle. Both men and women can enter the job market and decide over themselves and their property – unless they enter into other contractual arrangements. Thus, women no longer depend on men for economic support, and more and more men are able to hold their own when it comes to cooking, cleaning, washing the dishes, doing laundry and raising a child.

Sexuality, which had been severely suppressed since the witch trials of the late Middle Ages, was increasingly liberated during the 20th century: contraception was legalized, as was abortion, with certain restrictions, which unshackled the sensuous qualities of sexuality from its reproductive ties. Sexual minorities, in particular homosexuals and sadomasochists, were increasingly accepted and were no longer regarded (exclusively) as deviants. Giddens aptly describes the radical separation of sexuality and reproduction in today’s society:

Sexuality came into being as part of a progressive differentiation of sex from the exigencies of reproduction. With the further elaboration of reproductive technologies, that differentiation has today become complete. Now that conception can be artificially produced, rather than only artificially prevented, sexuality is at last fully autonomous. Reproduction can occur in the absence of sexual activity; this is a final ‘liberation’ for sexuality, which thence can become wholly a quality of individuals and their transactions with one another.

(Giddens, 1992, p. 27)

Giddens (1992) introduces the concepts of ‘plastic sexuality’ and ‘the pure relationship’ which he posits as characteristics of late modern relations. Plastic sexuality is a malleable sexuality that can be shaped to match the ‘reflexive project of the self’ without regard for reproduction (Giddens, 1991, p. 202). The pure relationship should be understood as a relationship of love and sexuality that is entered into for its own sake and is continued only as long as it still works in these two regards (Giddens, 1992, s. 58). In late modern society, individuals shape their own life story, structuring it into a narrative that is continually developed via reflection. The art, as Ulrich Beck (1986/1992) has observed, is to make the life story form a coherent narrative with the narrator as the one making the decisions – even if many of these decisions were in fact already made by other people and factors:

Even where the word ‘decisions’ is too grandiose, because neither consciousness nor alternatives are present, the individual will have to ‘pay for’ the consequences of decisions not taken.

(Beck, 1986/1992, p. 135)

However, Giddens and the current sociological-political mainstream understanding he represents tend to overstate the extent of individualization. Giddens ignores the fact that parents and children remain connected, regardless whether the child was conceived with or without sex and love. To a high degree, who and what the child is depends on the parents’ combined DNA. The reproductive link between parents and child is a biological fact. Giddens, however, verges on painting a picture of the late modern individual as a person devoid of age, gender and development or, perhaps, rather as someone who is forever 33 years of age, modifies their sexuality slightly, occasionally replaces their partner, pieces together their own personal religion, rolls their own sushi and ultimately weaves it all together into a compelling narrative.

However, in relation to both sex and reproduction, there continues to exist a mutual dependence between the sexes. To have a child, one must come to terms with one’s dependence on another person’s reproductive resources and thus suffer the indignity of not being complete on one’s own. A heterosexual person further has to tolerate his or her dependence on love from the other sex.

The majority of people still dream about establishing a family, with a husband, a wife and a certain number of children, who should be cute, funny, intelligent and beautiful and grow up to have good or accomplished lives, or both, and perhaps spare some time for the parents when they reach old age and need help and support. All in all, the family plays a bigger role in late modern society than sociology would suggest. Its citizens are not gendered- and ageless individuals who spend their waking hours reflecting on their ‘selves’. They are children and adults, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, grandparents and grandchildren, who are born, grow, reproduce and die.

Although work and leisure, family and working relationships, children and adults, men and women, sex and reproduction, education and work have been separated since the traditional societies fell apart, they are not so separate that they do not also connect in a multitude of ways.

The main link between family and work is that the former is the motivation for the latter. We spend most of our income on family expenses – rent, food, clothing, school, a car, holidays, insurance and so forth – and these material goods also serve as the visible markers of success (or the lack thereof) in work.

The positions we manage to attain in the workplace also contribute to our value as love objects. Rock singers and photo models have the widest choice of suitors, but statistics reveal that certain traditional attitudes still persist, as high-earning women are less likely to be in a steady relationship than men with a similar status, and low-income men are less likely to have a partner than low-income women. Many jobs have strong gender connotations; in Danish, for example, the word ‘nurse’ is explicitly gendered, while plumbers and tunnel workers have an unmistakable masculine air about them. These gendered job perceptions are gradually dissolving, however.

Further, to borrow a term from Hirschhorn (2003), the family acts as an evaluation team in both an internal and an external sense. Family birthdays and other occasions where the family members can exchange news and experiences serve as arenas for flaunting one’s latest achievements and perhaps for one’s siblings to make sure the family is updated on one’s latest failures and setbacks. Experiences from psychotherapy and role analysis seem to suggest that preferences in the choice of life partner, education and career are shaped by inner and outer dialogues, not least within the family. The superego is thus peopled with other figures besides the parents (Freud, 1923/1961a); siblings will make their opinions known when the internal evaluation team assesses the individual member’s actions (Koefoed & Visholm, 2011).

Finally, apart from the hospital maternity ward, the family is the first organization we encounter. Hence, it comes to serve as a prototype or basic model for our experiences in and of organizations – our ‘organization in the mind’ (Armstrong, 2005). The family thus becomes the primary source of transferences in organizations.

This lets us identify the following fairly firm connections between family and working life: 1) the family is the motivation of work (our pay goes to provide for the family), 2) work helps determine our value as love objects, 3) the family serves as an internal and an external evaluation team and 4) the family is the first organization we come into contact with.

II The family in group and organization literature

Despite the connections between family and working life, both open and hidden family phenomena are absent from traditional group and organization literature.

Adrian Furnham’s The psychol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Connections between family and organization
• 2. The Oedipus complex – now with siblings: Lines of argument
• 3. Digression: myths, fairy tales and metaphors: Parental power – the cost of solidarity
• 4. Promoted siblings and temporary parents: About democracy and psychodynamic in Lewin and Winnicott
• 5. The foreman’s ghost – sibling rivalry in self-managing teams
• 6. Systems psychodynamics and subsystems: Family or organization, tyranny, democracy, crowd, market and panic
• 7. Gender
• 8. Role analysis
• 9. Mergers
• 10. Innovation
• 11. Globalization and modernization
• References
• Index