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

(Hardback)

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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 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 provided of thinking, feeling, and action that also impoverish those who work with the codependent. The author develops important theoretical pespectives 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 14 common behaviour 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 behaviour contribute to the development of the three faces of codependency. The 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 should be of interest to employee assistance staff, training personnel, counsellors and therapists, consultations, and students of the psychodynamics of organizational life.

Reviews

This book takes us much closer to understanding one of the underlying causes for some of the issues we are all dealing with in our efforts to reshape organizations. We recommend it to anyone and everyone interested in understanding more about what makes codependent people act as they do at work.-Personnel Psychology
"This book takes us much closer to understanding one of the underlying causes for some of the issues we are all dealing with in our efforts to reshape organizations. We recommend it to anyone and everyone interested in understanding more about what makes codependent people act as they do at work."-Personnel Psychology

Author Bio

SETH ALLCORN is the Associate Dean for Fiscal Affairs at the Stritch School of Medicine of Loyola University in Chicago. He has also served as the administrator of the Department of Medicine at the University of Rochester and the University of Missouri--Columbia. He is the author of two books, Internal Auditing for Hospitals (1979) and Workplace Superstars in Resistant Organizations (Quorum, 1991), as well as numerous articles on a variety of healthcare and workplace psychology subjects.