Corporate Stockholm Syndrome

When Your Job Holds You Hostage

As one climbs from rung to rung on the corporate ladder, a sense of commitment begins to form to the company. Not only is there a path to follow continuing from the ingrained route from school, but the path is spiked with pay, complete with benefits machinations designed to keep you locked in such as the deferred bonus. These programs are how companies protect their investments into its employee base which is usually the highest cost of capital in its balance sheet.

Companies love to plaster platitudes such as Go Outside of Your Comfort Zone and Failure is Not the Opposite of Success but Part of Success all over lunch halls or desktop background wallpapers, but the motivations behind them are always linked to brand name marketing, human resource management, and recruiting KPIs. 

The goal is to leverage these purported professional development programs to coax employees into believing that the company actually cares for them, and that it will invest in them as part of its quest for greater workforce productivity. While there is some truth to this, specifically the part about workforce productivity, some of the greatest lies are baked in half-truths. Employees are all aware, to varying degrees, of the true purpose of these programs and some take advantage of the offers while others do the bare minimum to avoid being entered into the dreaded non-compliance blacklist. 

These programs, along with other corporate “team building” activities that include off-sites eventually form a base layer of comfort that pads the core utility of income that jobs provide. Over time, employees add to their investment in terms of time and effort devoted to their company in exchange for pay and experience. The more invested they are, the harder it becomes to alter course due to the “sunk cost fallacy,” which is persisting on a course of action simply because one has already heavily invested in it.

At the extreme end of the spectrum are lifers - people who literally ride out their careers at a single company. Some can have “successful” careers, reaching top positions and can provide for and support their families. Most have a retirement plan and package that supports them long after they stop working. A parting gift from the company in return for all the decades of loyalty. I know these “successful” lifers well, not only as colleagues with whom I’ve worked with, but also as a son of one.

However, I also know many lifers who aren’t in top positions and who are essentially held captive by their job. Most of these people I’ve come across are underemployed, meaning they have far more capabilities and potential than the function they are getting paid for at their job. Yet, they persist in continuing to work at their job, even as they acknowledge all their grievances in venting sessions over drinks after work. 

Their plight reminds me of the Stockholm Syndrome, which originated from an incident that took place during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1973. Four victims were held captive by the robbers for a duration of six days. Surprisingly, after their rescue, the hostages displayed a protective and friendly attitude towards their captors, even forming a bond with them. The rescuers were literally dumbfounded. This astonishing behavior became known as Stockholm Syndrome, and highlights our capacity to form unexpected connections. It typically occurs when we perceive a threat to our survival, pushing them to create psychological defense mechanisms to cope with the situation. 

Obviously, companies are not outright kidnapping people and forcing them to become employees - the setup to the situation is completely different. However, once put in similar situations, people behave predictably. We form a dependency to the income stream provided by our employers. By investing our time and energy into climbing corporate ladders, we become more and more indebted to the company propping up the ladder.

Jumping off to switch to another ladder gets scarier the higher up we go as we have more to lose. And, as we gain repeated exposure to the professional development and team building activities that companies provide, we subsume these programs as well-intentioned even if we cognitively understand that they are simply tools to increase productivity and retention rates.

For all the talk we hear about how the employment landscape is shifting and how employees are shifting between jobs more frequently now, the data paints a different picture. Based on the most recent job tenure data from the U.S. government, a Pew Research Center analysis reveals that today's young adults have similar job stability compared to their counterparts over the past four decades.

In January 2022, 44% of workers aged 18 to 34 in the United States reported that they had been employed by their current employer for three years or longer. In 1983, that number was 44%. If we expand the data to include a global data set, we find that the U.S. is actually on the lower end of the scale, as many developed countries such as those in the OECD present averages of 8-10 years with a single employer.

The reality is that we are not shifting jobs every two years as many recruiting and hiring agencies may convey to potential job candidates.

In order to break the spell of being lulled into an obfuscated hostage situation at work, the first step is to realize that one is in a hostage situation to begin with. Signs include restlessness, lack of fulfilment, underemployment, and fear of losing one’s job. These symptoms point to a life that is not under one’s own control, but rather a life that is being controlled by another entity simply because other options have been weathered away over time through psychological programming.

People who find themselves in this situation have taken the first critical step as they have become aware. What follows requires courage and perseverance - topics we will discuss in future FoFty articles.

Watch the accompanying YouTube episode on this topic here: