First, workplace relationships are not relationships among equals, and the inequalities are material, as well as psychological. In a marriage or love affair, either partner can initiate a termination, but at work, your bosses can fire you while you cannot fire your bosses. Similarly, your bosses can give you a poor performance appraisal that becomes part of your official personnel record, but in most organizations, you are not asked or allowed to formally appraise your bosses or comment on their performance for the record. What's more, the impact of a performance appraisal goes far beyond your personal emotional response raises, bonuses, training opportunities, promotions, and a variety of other perks are linked implicitly or explicitly to your appraisal.
Second, emotional responses are the very spice of life in personal relationships: we expect and are expected to have strong feelings and to express them in personal relationships. Many couples, for example, view anger and fighting as normal, healthy aspects of their relationship, and many experts agree with their views. Not infrequently, couples report feeling most sexually aroused and satisfied when making up in bed after a battle. Yet, many of the same people report having great difficulty getting over anger provoking incidents at the office, where there are no accepted mechanisms for releasing tensions by fighting or repairing relationships by reaffirming affectionate ties.
As noted previously, anger in particular and strong emotions in general are considered unprofessional, inappropriate, and possibly pathological within the majority of organizations. And, if having strong feelings at work is suspect, expressing them is taboo, which makes working them through to a satisfactory resolution impossible.
Thirdly in theory at least, most of us value honesty, sincerity, openness, trustworthiness, integrity, reliability, and sensitivity in personal relationships. We also tend to see these qualities as ends in themselves, rather than as strategic guidelines valued only to the extent that they help us achieve other, self centered goals through our relationships. But in the workplace, qualities supporting self promotion and survival of the organization implicitly or explicitly supersede the qualities generally valued in personal relationships. Although corporate training programs in interpersonal skills sometimes use words like sincerity and integrity? they view these qualities in workplace relationships as tactics for achieving corporate or career objectives, not as qualities valuable in themselves for relationships.
Fourth, workplace terminations are more isolating, brutal, and absolute than the terminations characteristic of personal relationships. A variety of social mechanisms serve to moderate and mediate the termination of personal relationships. Laws and legal proceedings, for example, force couples to continue relating long after a decision to separate has been reached. In addition, our legal system tries to ensure at least a modicum of fairness and reciprocity in settling disputes about custody of children and division of property.
Mutual friends and relatives may also provide conduits of communication for the warring parties in conflicted personal relationships, even when physical distance separates them. In the case of relationships terminated by death, our culture provides a variety of rituals to facilitate mourning the loss, recovering from it, and preserving a relationship with the deceased through fond memories. Funerals, wakes, memorial services, and anniversary observances help us through the trauma of a loved one s death; at the same time, these activities keep the deceased alive in memory, allowing us to maintain some emotional connection.
A terminated employee, on the other hand, is often a persona non grata at a former place of employment. Some organizations, fearing sabotage, theft, lowering of morale among survivors of personnel cutbacks, or violent and destructive acts, go so far as to give fired employees only a few hours' notice of termination and to ban them from returning to their offices. Furthermore, job loss carries a stigma despite the rash of recent government layoffs and corporate downsizings and our society still tends to blame the terminated employee for the loss of a job.
Because of the strong tendency to stigmatize victims and the strong inclination of victims to internalize blame, people who lose jobs do not enjoy the social, familiar, and legal sympathy and support provided for those who lose other kinds of important relationships. For some, the shame associated with job loss is so great that they try to keep the loss secret as long as possible from as many people as possible. Not uncommon are reports of terminated employees who continue to prepare for work each morning and leave for the office in order to hide from family, friends, and neighbors the fact that they no longer have jobs. When the loss of a job is treated in this way, sorrow and anger cannot be expressed openly, and the loss cannot be mourned in a way that prepares the sufferer for self repair and restoration.
