Codependency in the Workplace : A Guide for Employee Assistance and Human Resource Professionals

Codependency is an important psychological aspect of the workplace that adversely affects both those who experience codependency and those who are the subject of the codependent's compelling agenda of interpersonal control. In this important book, Seth Allcorn explores codependency in the workplace beginning with its origins in the family. Many new insights are provided about the characteristic self-defeating and paradoxical patterns of thinking, feeling, and action that also impoverish those who work with the codependent. The author develops important new theoretical perspectives and models of codependency by drawing upon psychoanalytic theory. The three faces of codependency are described for the first time and a sophisticated psychodynamic model of the psychological gridlock of codependency explains the codependent's self-defeating and interpersonally destructive agenda of control. Allcorn concludes his book with ideas about how managers can deal more effectively with the presence of codependency in their organization.

The author begins by defining codependency and uses a model to explain how it arises in pathological families of origin. He then describes three faces of codependency and relates them to fourteen common behavior attributes and the workplace. Allcorn explores how this disorder manifests itself in different genders and situations, outlines a learning model and a Family Pathology Matrix, and shows how different pairings of parental behavior contribute to the development of the three faces of codependency. The difficulties which codependency introduces into the workplace is a primary focus, and the book concludes with a search for solutions within the organizational culture that may alleviate the need for codependent defenses and lead to one-on-one interventions at work. This book will be of interest to employee assistance staff, training personnel, counselors and therapists, consultants, and students of the psychodynamics of organizational life.

SETH ALLCORN is the Associate Dean for Fiscal Affairs at the Stritch School of Medicine of Loyola University in Chicago.