Last year I submitted my INSEAD EMC program final thesis on the psychodynamic elements that explain how individuals, teams, and organizations experience parental leave. Psychodynamics intends to uncover unconscious factors and underlying defenses that pervade groups and teams. What inspired this topic? Because I lived this process in its many manifestations: the good, the bad, and the quite ugly. But mostly, what bothered me was how something so pervasive and inevitable such as parental leave could have been experienced as such a disruptive and exceptionally unexceptional process. Imagine the pink elephant in the room, except this time the pink elephant has horns, wings, and a cascade of multiple colors shooting from its eyes. Also, try to imagine this pink elephant with its horns, wings, and multicolored eye lasers treated as a completely ordinary and familiar face by colleagues and peers. The whimsical pink elephant is a bit of what it is like to go through parental leave in an organization: both maddening and tiring, as well as exhilarating and incredible. The regular hum of office life continues unabated. At the same time, within a new parent's mind, a raging and chaotic battle has begun over which identity will predominate: parent or worker, worker or parent? Can't it be both?
My thesis research intended to uncover the hidden and unconscious layers of parental leave as an individual and group experience. How do flexible and supportive policies (directed at new parents) affect the teams and managers that have to respond to the employees who use those policies to spend extended time with families? The effects are pervasive - from the individuals taking leave to the team colleagues and managers - because parental leave is inherently disruptive to the regular flow of business tasks and responsibilities. Additionally, ample research points to the detrimental disruption new parenthood can have on the careers of primary caregivers of young children in the form of motherhood and flexibility biases, which are manifested both consciously and unconsciously via reduced work opportunities and stagnated promotions and wages. In short, when the family domain and work domains unavoidably cross, the consequences can be dire for all involved individuals and teams.
So what can be done? More flexible and supportive policies for parents? More budget for teams to cover the cost of employees taking leave? Absolutely. The path to success is the path of constant reevaluation and interrogation of the current norms. But what about the more unconscious aspects of leave, such as the defense mechanisms and biases that saturate deep within the mechanical workings of organizational performance?
Newton's three laws of motion is an apt analogy for parental leave in organizations and may assist in describing critical takeaways from my thesis research. In summary, Newton's three laws address how objects and systems respond to and engage with forces (forces being the causes of the motion). Forces either push or pull on an object or body. For the purposes of better illuminating the qualitative research done on how an organization reacts to the presence of parental leave, the three laws may help describe what happens when parental leave (being the external force) knocks on an organization's door (being the object or system).
Newton's First Law of Motion: An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion at a constant speed in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. This law is also called the law of inertia, or the tendency of objects to resist any changes to their current state of motion. Without the presence of parental leave, what do organizations do? They remain as is, functioning according to the needs of the work system, allocating roles and responsibilities, identifying present issues, and envisioning possible future states. Yet parental leave is inevitable in most organizations because family is unavoidable in any system dealing with humans as employees. Like it or not, humans do have lives outside of their work domains, and like it or not, those lives quite often involve having responsibilities to other humans who will very likely impact a worker's underlying ability to commit uncompromisingly to the work domain.
Parental leave is essential to consider not only according to the defined time boundaries of how long an individual is physically (and assuming mentally) absent from the office, but it is vital to consider how an individual returns to their work. Does the individual resume their work responsibilities as if parental leave were an inconsequential blip in their professional journey? Or does the transitional space between parental leave and returning to the workplace create new requirements for individuals intending to accommodate both work and family domains? New requirements such as flexibility and time away from the workplace to manage unanticipated child care needs? Or perhaps an individual returning to the workplace can only commit to part-time rather than full-time hours? How does that flexibility or change in work capacity impact the organization and, more specifically, the individual's team? Is the team able to offer additional flexibility (according to available resources and existing organizational policies), or will the team be unable to accommodate requests for flexibility? How does that ability or inability to offer flexibility affect the team and the individuals returning to the workplace? However the result transpires (or whether an individual benefits or is disadvantaged according to their needs), there is an inevitable strain on everyone affected - from the person taking leave and returning to work to the team that must react to parental leave within their work systems.
Newton's Second Law of Motion: An external force acts on a system from the outside, and the acceleration of the system is proportional to the external force and inversely proportional to the system's mass. Again, organizations will function as they always do and have no need to respond to parental leave unless parental leave presents itself. Yet parental leave is in itself inevitable, so try as they may, organizations will need to understand how parental leave is to fit within the fabric of its regular everyday functioning. Regarding the second law of motion, how an organization responds to parental leave depends on the actual impact on its system. What is the scope of the employees that will need to take leave to care for their families? The scope does not necessarily mean the number of individuals who will require parental leave at some point in time, but rather what will be the impact to an organization when the inevitable need arises for time off or flexibility for employees? How will teams and individual employees be able to cope with the external force of parental leave and the resulting aftermath of its appearance?
Parental leave is disruptive to organizations, both big and small. The degree to which that disruption impacts companies depends on various factors, including existing resources, responsibilities, and projected future needs. One employee requiring time off and additional flexibility does not have the same effect on every organization. Therefore the factor of mass in this analogy does not necessarily mean the amount of matter that makes up the system, but rather that the organizational system is composed of its tangible elements (who are the employees, what are needs of the employees, and how are those needs addressed via policies and organizational culture) and its intangible elements (unconscious defenses and emotions). The factor of acceleration manifests as the rate at which the organization is changing in response to parental leave. If an organization is resistant to change (which the law of inertia will say "yes, yes they are"), what will drive the change needed to address both the presence of parental leave and the fundamental needs of the business? In this analogy, the external force - represented as parental leave - must then be large enough to propel the kind of change that will benefit the organization. Understanding all of the factors - mass and acceleration - depends on the people, policies, and culture that embody the organizational system and its everyday mechanics.
Newton's Third Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the battle between work and family, who will ultimately prevail? Or is "battle" a bit too strong of a word to use in this context? But there is value in considering this topic from the perspective of two opposing forces e.g. crest/trough, high/low, etc. Are family and work so disparate that cohesion is all but an illusory prospect?
My thesis research revealed that an organization with supportive policies elicits inevitable tension because parental leave requires teams to respond to change, which really means teams are responding to a loss. When an individual is absent, the system must react to the loss by understanding how the individual's role and responsibilities will continue to be fulfilled. Whether this means hiring a temporary employee or existing employees taking on more responsibilities, the common denominator in this equation is disruption. Hence the push and pull between organizations offering employees more time away from work versus expecting less time away from work to take care of families.
Back to Newton's third law of motion, imagine the force of parental leave and the resulting friction represented by how the system responds. Parental leave is the push, and the resulting tension is the friction. One cannot exist without the other, and one reacts in an equally opposite way depending on its presence. It is quite literally a zero-sum game in which one action leads to an opposite and equal reaction.
Defense mechanisms are unconscious tools and strategies designed to protect the self and others from threat or anxiety. More broadly, social defenses are group-level defenses that aim to protect identities and inhibit change. What were some of the emotions and defenses (extracted from research) that occurred in response to parental leave?
Denial - the refusal to accept the reality of the situation. Organizations and individuals know parental leave is inevitably present but do not always proceed and function accordingly. So long as parental leave is considered more threatening rather than a catalyst for potential innovation and transformation in an organization, the process is likely to be more harmful than positive for all affected individuals.
Splitting - idealizing or devaluing others to tolerate the self or others. How an individual reacts to and connects with parental leave may determine how that individual perceives others as either positive or negative (or ambivalent). Parents may feel isolated or connected to others depending on how they identify and believe they fit within the organizational system. Concurrently, employees not taking leave or requiring work flexibility may perceive parents more negatively and differently than themselves.
Projection - attributing one's undesirable feelings or emotions onto others. Within the presence of anxiety or negative emotions, individuals may project their negative feelings onto others. My research revealed perceived gender differences have a significant influence on the experiences of individuals. In the organization I researched, women took the bulk of parental leave and were unconsciously assigned the role of those who would generally take parental leave. More specifically, women were identified as the individuals who would take leave versus men, for whom it was assumed would not require significant time or flexibility away from the workplace. These unconscious roles created tension for employees in how they connected and related to one another.
Projective Identification - when others subjected to projection internalize and own the projected qualities. Particularly with the presence of unconsciously-assigned gender roles and expectations, those individuals experiencing parental leave (in the case of my research, this was primarily represented by women) can take on the projected unconscious emotions and believe their roles within the organization to be compromised or changed. For example, one of the interviewees mentioned "mum guilt" and felt a possibly more productive position would involve a complete dissolution from the organization and a full-time role taking care of her children. Everyday tension between work and family domains can bring out defensive reactions and enable underlying beliefs that one's identity cannot accommodate both family and external work.
With disruption there is change, and with any change there is resistance. As the laws of motion describe, a system at rest or motion will stay in that state unless acted upon by an external force. With any new external force, the rate of change depends on the interaction of that force with the existing system. And finally, any action generates an equal and opposite reaction, which within the mind becomes a defensive push and pull over how to thwart perceived threat and reduce anxiety via how we engage with others in the workplace.
So what then? What could improve a process so equally inevitable, disruptive, and essential? What my research uncovered and proposed will be outlined in the next blog post. If curious, please feel free to have a look at the final thesis posted here:
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