When Family And Office Roles Overlap

By Simran Kapoor

The office joker. The mother hen. The king. The rebel. The gossip. The peacekeeper. The dude. Anyone who has ever been part of a workplace culture can probably recognise at least one of those characters in the cubicle next door.

But workplace roles and the dynamics among colleagues can go much deeper than those somewhat superficial stereotypes, especially in a nation where many people spend as much time with colleagues as they do with their families, where the office so often mirrors the family.

A boss is not just a boss, in the view of some psychologists who study workplace roles; he can be a stand-in for a disapp rov i n g and distant father. An unpredictable, easily angered manager can be a thinly veiled rejecting mother. Colleagues competing for the boss’s attention — or merit raises and bonuses — are siblings in rivalry.

The employees of a company acquired by another in a hostile merger? They can experience seething resentment toward what they feel is an unwelcome stepparent, according to psychologists working with companies to manage emotional fallout during a merger. There is, too, the workplace spouse, a co-worker of the opposite sex who shares a kind of closeness achieved only through the intense experience of long weeks at the same office.

Given all the stress and uncertainty driven by the economic crisis, some companies, with the help of business and organisational psychologists, are plumbing the depths of these feelings and roles, trying to gauge their effects at a time when emotions are running high. A growing number of business psychologists and executive coaches are also looking at the influence of birth order and other family roles and niches on office.

“Work is nothing more than an entirely complex set of relationships,” said Michael W. Norris, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, who runs monthly leadership coaching groups and individual sessions with senior executives. “You have partners that are your equals, subordinates, superiors,”Norris said. “It’s parents and siblings. All of these dynamics that are exactly the same in the workplace, just the titles are different.”

For example, said Laurence J. Stybel, a psychologist in Boston, specialising in organisational behaviour, “Somebody who is successful at getting resources in the family environment approaches the corporate environment with a sense of confidence. Someone who was denied resources given to others approaches the corporate environment with the same concept.”

The use of personality testing in the workplace to measure employees’ “emotional intelligence” or, for example, how they handle conflict, has become increasingly common, said Benjamin Dattner, an organisational psychologist in New York who consults with companies on workplace issues and blogs for Psychology Today. Tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which measures how people perceive the world and make decisions, are given to millions of employees each year, Dattner said.

The idea is to help increase their effectiveness, say, by having a team of co-workers better understand their strengths and weaknesses — although the usefulness of such tests is debated. There are also a number of character typology studies — some frivolous and some more serious — that have sought to define the roles office workers play. In one re c e n t study that T-Mobile in Britain commissioned to gain insight into how its employees interact, a psychologist interviewed workers and came up with eight character types. When times are difficult economically, a workplace character identified as the “mother hen” — with a comforting voice of reason and empathy — may help raise the group’s spirit, Honey Langcaster-James, a psychologist, concluded. The “office joker,” by contrast, “may decide that wisecracking” is “no longer appropriate in such dire times.”

The “dude,” another character in the study, “T-Mobile Workplace Motivation Report,” which is available online, is described as “laid back and relaxed,” and this relaxed attitude “also means that he/she doesn’t transfer pressure onto colleagues — a trait most workmates would be grateful for,” the report says.