Emotional Abuse and Neglect in the Workplace

How to Restore Normal Organizational Life

Joost Kampen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137534330
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Emotional Abuse and Neglect in the Workplace tackles the big questions: How does emotional neglect of employees affect an organization? How can management effectively manage while restoring an organization's health? When trust is gone, only reliable behavior by senior managers can help - and this takes time. The author explores striking similarities between the symptoms of ailing organizations and abusive or neglectful families. This book explores not only a new theory of neglected organizations, but also a set of methods enabling OD practitioners to restore employees' trust. It also provides diagnostic tools and guidelines for change agents who confront organizational neglect head-on and includes case studies and real-life experiences of OD practitioners.

1

Parenting: A Source of Inspiration for Leadership

This book is based on my PhD dissertation in which I explore the reasons why my interventions as an organizational development (OD) consultant did not always have the desired effect. After searching in vain for an explanation in the change management literature, I happened upon knowledge from a different domain. I discovered that the terminology of developmental psychology described the phenomena I encountered in my consultancy practice. I applied these concepts to organizations. This commercial edition of my PhD research is intended for a wide audience of OD professionals. This chapter summarizes my approach to organizational change and traces the process through which I developed the concept of emotional neglect in organizations (Section 1.1). It also describes my surprise at the ineffectiveness of change interventions at Gemeentevervoerbedrijf (GVB), Amsterdam’s public transport company, and my conclusion that the lack of reciprocity there was the key to why its reorganizations had failed (Section 1.2). Section 1.3 focuses on the use of metaphors to describe organizations, in particular the metaphor of neglectful parenting. Section 1.4 provides an overview of the structure of this book.

1.1 When change fails and leadership is lacking

This book is about what happens when an organization lacks leadership in the dimensions of structure and consideration for a protracted period of time. Everyday life in such organizations becomes destabilized. To cast it in terms from the field of developmental psychology, an organization in this state is no longer able to fulfill its developmental tasks. As a whole, it becomes a case of arrested development. Observing this organizational reality through the lens of child development and parenting, I will focus on three aspects: similarities between parenting styles and leadership styles; the impact of an organization’s social context; and people’s response to a lack of expectations, boundaries and recognition.

When change processes in an organization fail, it is a sign of arrested development. In such cases, there is usually a lot of management, but a lack of leadership (Bennis, 1989). Emotional neglect in an organization is never the result of a single, drastic reorganization process; neglect is always gradual and starts with habituation.

As part of an organization, you get used to ‘how things are done around here.’ Newcomers are struck by things they later do not even notice anymore. Situations that initially stand out as unusual or illogical become self-evident, especially after several unsuccessful attempts at change. Staff and management simply become inured to plans and budgets that are announced but never properly implemented or monitored. After every alteration of the organizational structure, people sooner or later revert to their old behavior; only the departments and job titles have changed. Outsiders such as OD practitioners are confronted with these phenomena as they design and supervise change processes. As trained observers, they notice that no one seems to care about formal objectives, relationships, agreements, and procedures (Kampen and Mulder, 2007).

OD practitioner’s ‘X-ray vision’

‘Reading the organization’ is a type of investigative intuition that combines observation and sensitivity with an eye for what is missing. Schein (2008) calls this clinical inquiry. In this process, OD practitioners must reserve judgment and curb their urge to respond. They do not know what they are looking for, but mull over their impressions, compare them with earlier experiences with organizations, and construct in their mind ‘what might be going on here.’ They then put their thoughts down in writing, expressing what they feel are the core issues. They wait to test their hypotheses until their interlocutors at the organization express a relevant problem. Practitioners ‘reach’ these sparring partners by connecting with, crystallizing, and articulating their problems. Practitioners then suggest a few avenues of thought to their interlocutors; only at this point does the concept of emotional neglect in the organization come up. Practitioners leave their interlocutors with a sense of having identified ‘what it’s all about’ and often with the realization that they are ‘part of the problem.’ Interlocutors tend to find it uncomfortable to hear the truth; but now they have to ‘face it’ and can no longer ignore the core problem. Their response tells OD practitioners whether they are able to ‘read’ the organization and are willing to get to the bottom of things.

OD practitioners engaging in this process dig deeper than reflective practitioners (Schön, 1983), as they reveal the unmentionable and their approach is aimed at uncovering the source of the problem.

It is generally known and accepted that OD practitioners take the complex dynamics of organizations into account in their change strategy. Yet Boonstra (2004) found that 70 percent of planned changes are thwarted by unclear policy and strategic processes, existing organizational structures, power games and office politics, entrenched organizational culture, and personal and group resistance. Many change processes ignore the obvious complexity and overlook the underlying reasons for shortcomings in the organization.

When looking at an organization’s dysfunctionality through the lens of developmental psychology, the question is: What went wrong in the organization’s development? In other words, the organization’s inability to function properly may result from developmental retardation. The following is a list of common signs of dysfunction that surface during change processes:

• Failure to honor agreements, rule-breaking and transgressive behavior is not punished;

• Staff (and often direct supervisors as well) becomes passive, continually asking senior management for explanations and making new objections;

• In meetings and in the corridors, there is an inappropriately jovial atmosphere which begs the question what truth is being suppressed;

• There is an excessively informal relationship between management and staff;

• Personal relationships take precedence over formal roles and job titles: everyone from the CEO to the doorman is addressed by their first name, even in official documents;

• Management is fickle and unpredictable in its decision-making, priority-setting, and oversight;

• Sick leave hits a record high and management is unable to bring it back down;

• There is a lot of peer pressure and closing of ranks within work units and teams;

• Staff displays and experiences many types of transgressive behavior, yet is rarely willing to report it and transgressions are vehemently denied;

• Professional knowledge is taken to mean unassailable authority; when someone is praised for their professionalism, this implies that the person is above the law;

• Content is everything; management insists on knowing all the details of the work processes, while human behavior and social relationships are dismissed as psychologists’ concerns;

• Rostering and working hours are a constant bone of contention. Staff, planners, management, workers’ council, and HR play complicated political games.

• Gossip is rife; anyone who is not talked about has been written off;

• Training sessions have no lasting effect and most managers just return to business as usual;

• Senior management is embroiled in a power game; no one knows what it is actually about, but everyone has an opinion on it. And no one ever notices any real changes resulting from these power games. Sometimes staff is suddenly asked to fill out a questionnaire, and most do, even though the results never lead to anything anyway;

• A small issue – such as watching a soccer game at work – can escalate into a big conflict between management and staff;

• Significant incidents – such as graffiti about management on the restroom walls or a swastika on a manager’s office door – are downplayed.

This book is based on my work as a reflective practitioner. The question why interventions failed to achieve their objectives at GVB spurred me to look for a deep-seated problem. This eventually led me to postulate the concept of emotional neglect in the workplace. My theory and practical tools can be of benefit to all professionals who may be faced with emotional abuse and neglect in the workplace; that is, governors and directors, CEOs, executive directors, senior managers, direct supervisors, HR advisors, workers’ council members, external consultants, and interim managers.

1.2 Emotional neglect in the workplace

It is a widely accepted idea in organizational studies that personal relationships are an important precondition for bringing about changes in behavior (Lewin, 1943). The wealth of literature about effective leadership through incentive and motivation or reward and punishment implicitly assumes that there is a reciprocal relationship between management and staff (Bass, 1990). It is generally recognized that a consultant can only play an effective advisory and supervisory role in organizational change if there is a relationship between the consultant and members of the organization. This is why efforts by OD consultants to involve people within the organization in the desired changes are regarded as an effective strategy and one that promotes ownership of the new situation.¹

During my work as an OD practitioner at GVB, I was struck by the lack of response to my change strategy. People neither embraced nor resisted my ideas. In any case, changes did not materialize. Rather, daily life in the workplace just continued as if nothing had happened. In the chapters ahead, I will focus on the consequences of a lack of reciprocity when intervening in organizations to facilitate changes. I will provide theories, methods, tools, and many examples from real life.

Let us begin by looking at the phenomenological explanation for change strategies from a developmental psychology point of view (Kampen and Schuiling, 2005). In our study, Schuiling and I identified striking similarities between the behavior of emotionally abused and neglected children and the behavior of staff in various case studies in OD practice: ‘Employees seem alienated from their work, each other, management and the objectives of the organization’ (Kampen and Schuiling, 2005, p. 38).

When reciprocity is lost, staff distrusts management but does not say so. This is why they do pay lip service to a change process but their responses do not meet the OD practitioner’s expectations. From a developmental psychology perspective, management’s role is crucial; they are responsible for the development of the organization’s human capital. When we compared emotionally neglected organizations to families with neglectful parents, we found in both a lack of availability and sensitivity. When management is not emotionally responsive, staff turns away and copes with the situation on their own.

I will discuss the lack of response to change strategies in greater detail in Chapter 2. Based on my analysis of two failed organizational changes at Amsterdam’s GVB, I explore what impact the loss of responsiveness has on an organization’s functioning and ability to change. Schuiling (2014) describes responsiveness as the response of one part of the organizational system to the needs of another. In his view, interventions that improve the organizational system are those that simultaneously help improve its effectiveness and competence (both of the organization as a whole and its individual employees). He has shown a correlation between lack of responsiveness in senior management and the stifling of empowerment and entrepreneurial spirit in direct supervisors and staff. He has also shown that direct supervisors’ and staff’s development resumes as soon as a situation of mutual availability is restored. Restoration of responsiveness has a catalytic effect on efforts to bring about organizational change.

Restoring responsiveness was not the answer at GVB, however. Creating mutual availability in direct interaction between management and staff, in the expectation that this would kick-start their development, turned out to be wholly ineffective. Despite big efforts made by direct supervisors and the time and effort put into the employees’ needs, qualities and competencies, distrust persisted and staff was not prepared to take responsibility for their tasks. Employees were not prepared to actually engage with their managers. Apparently, it does not suffice to re-establish mutual availability when this has been absent for a very long time. Things do not simply get better when management is suddenly available and shows an interest in its staff. Why is this so? How can OD practitioners and management restore an emotionally neglected organization to health?

1.3 Metaphors and narratives

I use metaphors to diagnose organizations and to propose appropriate interventions that can restore emotionally neglected organizations to health. The use of metaphor in organizational studies is nothing new. Gareth Morgan’s (1986) well-known Images of Organization explores multiperspectivist analyses of organizations, employing paradigms from biology, physics, political science, and other disciplines as metaphors. Surprisingly, the field of organizational studies has not drawn much on parenting and child development. There are a few papers that discuss similarities between leadership and parenting, but none that focus on emotional neglect.² This book emphasizes developmental psychology and child development in particular, that is the field that deals with the problems encountered in raising and teaching children and young adults. Concepts from this field will be applied to learning and developmental difficulties in organizations that I characterize as emotionally neglected.

Metaphors enable us to assign meaning to the unknown by appealing to our knowledge of the known: ‘Metaphor is principally a way of conceiving one thing in terms of another, and its primary function is understanding’ (Lakoff and Turner, 1989, p. 112). Metaphors are maps that help us find our way from one conceptual domain into another. In this case, descriptions of parenting styles and the behavior of neglected children, taken from the domain of child development, help us understand the conduct of management and staff in organizations. The relationship between management and staff can be disrupted in ways that are reminiscent of a troubled parent–child relationship. This comparison can help us understand why certain change interventions do not have the intended effect in emotionally neglected organizations.

Obviously, this does not mean that managers should literally be compared to parents and staff to children. My root metaphor, or the metaphor that serves as the foundation of my argument, colors the dominant view of reality (Inns, 2002). Many root metaphors are taken from agriculture, biology, human anatomy, or medical science. In reorganizations, the agricultural metaphor of cutting back (as in pruning trees and shrubs) justifies layoffs, since it allows the organization to grow and bloom all the more come springtime. Similarly, the medical metaphor o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Parenting: A Source of Inspiration for Leadership
• 2. Amsterdam Public Transport: A Tough Nut to Crack
• 3. Emotional Neglect and Child Development
• 4. Neglect in the Workplace: Definition and Diagnosis
• 5. Recovering from Neglect
• 6. Good and Bad Leadership Styles
• 7. Recovery from Neglect: Coping and Intervening
• 8. Lessons for OD Practitioners
• 9. In Conclusion: A New OD Concept
• Appendix I: Leadership Questionnaire
• Appendix II:  Organizational Trust Questionnaire
• Appendix III: Diagnostic Checklist: Signs of Neglect
• Appendix IV: Checklist: Preconditions for Recovery
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index