Here is an interesting question. Why are layoff survivors like prisoners? There seem to be three similiarities.
- Layoff survivors are (based on some good research) depressed, angry, anxious, and fearful. People in prisons also have these feelings.
- The reason layoff survivors have what I call “layoff survivor sickness” is that they place all their social and emotional eggs in the organizational basket. Who they are, their sense of relevance and purpose is defined by the organization. I ask the question, “If who you are is where you work, what’s at threat if you job’s at threat?” The answer is a lot more than a paycheck – your sense of relevance and purpose. In prisons, inmates also develop what is called an “institutional personality.” They can’t cope outside the system since the system has conditioned them into dependency. Their sense of relevancy, purpose, and value is defined by the system. This is why there is a lot of recidivism – ex cons find, often unconsciously, ways to get back into the system. The cure for employees is to break, what I call, “organizational co-dependency,” defining their self-worth by remaining employed in one organization. The cure for prisoners to break an institutional identity is the same, to develop a sense of purpose and value outside the system.
- In both prisons and organizations, what psychologists call the “locus of control” is external – defined by the system and not the individual. In prisons the external factors are gangs, sub-groups, privileges given by the institution or the power structure of gangs. In organizations the external factors are status, office size, cliques, access to information, what meetings you attend, etc. Both of these external factors serve to connect individuals to organizations for the wrong reasons. Healthy employees and prisoners who have a chance of making it outside the institution define their sense of purpose, value, and relevance internally. That way when their jobs or their institutional residence is threatened, that’s all that is threatened, not their sense of identity. When they loose a job that is all they loose or when they leave prison they bring their value system with them and can apply it to the outside world.
