Emotional Abuse and Neglect in the Workplace

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.

In this chapter, we briefly put the domain of organizational development aside and explore developmental psychology, in particular child development. Schuiling and I happened upon this domain during our research and were pleasantly surprised to find that it provided us with an entirely new perspective on issues we had struggled with in our OD practice (Kampen and Schuiling, 2005). The literature on child abuse and neglect helped me define what neglect in an organizational context is and how it can be diagnosed and treated. This chapter will focus specifically on those aspects of child abuse and neglect that are relevant to organization development problems, namely, the hallmarks of neglectful parents/caretakers, children’s responses to neglect, good and bad parenting styles, and effective treatment of neglectful parents and neglected children. For the purposes of this book, I will disregard physical abuse and focus solely on emotional abuse and neglect.