The Addictive Organization: Why We Overwork, Cover Up, Pick Up the Pieces, Please the Boss, and Perpetuate S

Discover how companies mimic the destructive habits of active addicts—and find a clear path toward systemic organizational recovery.

Schaef and Fassel show how managers, workers, and organization members exhibit the classic symptoms of addiction: denying and avoiding problems, assuming that there is no other way of acting, and manipulating events to maintain the status quo.

Management teams frequently absorb personal dysfunction, allowing nonrecovering workers to replicate troubled family dynamics across company divisions. The authors examine how workaholism, institutional secrecy, and crisis management operate as shared defenses that protect the status quo.

Drawing on cases from hospitals and multinational firms, the text outlines twelve-step intervention tools designed to guide institutions into recovery.

• Corporate Culture: Discover the four distinct levels where addictive processes infect an enterprise, from executive blackouts and misplaced loyalties to companies that function as the addictive substance itself.
• Workplace Codependency: Examine how well-meaning employees enable destructive supervisors by smoothing over missed deadlines, suppressing honest conflict, and confusing institutional martyrdom with genuine care.
• Systems Theory: Learn why expensive consulting packages and communication seminars fail when they treat surface symptoms rather than confronting the underlying addiction driving institutional paralysis.
• Leadership Frameworks: Replace rigid hierarchies and the illusion of control with situational leadership, permeable organizational boundaries, and open, multidirectional communication.
• Also by This Author: Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, Escape from Intimacy and Meditations for Living in Balance.