Have you ever had a subordinate get all emotional on you
displaying anger, love, or admiration? Have you ever had
someone react emotionally to criticism? Does it strike you
as odd that teens rebel against parental authority and then a
few years later marry spouses bearing a striking resemblance
to these same mothers or fathers? Or perhaps it seems oddly
familiar.
Sigmund Freud understood. And Bonnie Oglensky, from City
University of New York, recently turned to his
century-old ideas in an effort to improve our understanding
of employees. She explored Freud's theories concerning
dependency and control, and then applied them in examining a
case of a 32-year old, Korean attorney in a minority law
firm. In the case, the attorney talked at length about her
experiences in the firm, and from the case Oglensky
identified Freudian themes repeated countless times in other
work settings, themes Freud explained long ago, which led her
to new insights the rest of us can use to be more effective
as managers.
Here's a tip: The next time you interview, ask about home
backgrounds and encourage elaboration of relationships with
parents. The chances are good you'll hear themes that will
be repeated with you if you hire this person. That's because
early relationships with parents become a framework for
subsequent authority relationships. People look for bosses
that feel familiar to them and then play out scripts and
dramas relying upon themes from childhood. For example, a
child who experiences conditional love becomes overly
sensitive to criticism. Criticism both reminds the child
love is being withheld and shows the child how to receive
love, by correcting the behavior being criticized. As a
boss, when you notice performance deficiencies in this person
and try to address them, you'll suddenly find yourself in the
middle of an emotional drama where your words and intentions
take on unexpected new meanings and you'll find yourself in
the midst of a powerful struggle with phantoms from early
childhood. You didn't have a chance. Your words were
filtered through expectations that added all the elements
needed to play out the drama one more frustrating time.
The same thing can happen when you fail to say
"Good morning,"
as your people arrive and find you've triggered miserable
feelings of rejection and abandonment. Heck, you were just
thinking about all the work you had to do!
At the other extreme lie employees who lift up the boss to
a lofty pedestal, idealizing and showering compliments and
admiration upon him/her. Such dynamics may cause
subordinates to feel nourished and to strive to fulfill high
expectations, or they may cripple their efforts. They may
feel small and insignificant. At its worst, these employee
dynamics collide with a boss who has delusions of grandeur
who imagines all the adoration is justified. Then you have a
real mess.
Two things to remember:
First, these patterns of acting and reacting, feeling and
choosing are based on wishes, images, and ideas that are
strong, contradictory, and unconscious. Often, people don't
know these notions are swimming around in their brains and
would deny they were if you suggested it.
Second, children depend upon parents for survival, yet the
goal of growth is independence. So it's natural for them to
thrive in a state of dependency and at the same time strive
for removal of the parent to achieve independence. As
adults, to occasionally feel very dependent is comforting,
but sometimes it's also painful. You trigger all these
feelings because of your authority relationship with
subordinates.
Like riding a bucking bronco, Professor Oglensky suggests
you keep these dynamics in mind as you manage your people,
and she cautions against punishing people with indifference
and impersonality when they express normal needs for
dependency and recognition. Our admiration for independence
in our employees make such reactions likely, she believes, if
we're not careful.
She also reminds us that we need to stand at the boundary
between our people and the larger organization, negotiating
demands made by others to fully utilize our people's
abilities without overwhelming their resources. This is a
need which never goes away.
And finally, she reminds us that we're people too, subject
to the same influence of unconscious thoughts. And most of
us have bosses too.
Reference:
Oglensky, Bonnie D. (1995) Socio-Psychoanalytic
Perspectives on the Subordinate.
Human Relations,
48 (9), 1029-1056.
Supervision Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.
Freud in the Workplace
An examination of Freud's theories reveal striking insights into how subordinates relate to authority.