1. The consequences of Power-without-Love for relationships among Tops (the inside view)

Relative significance

There are issues about who are the more and less important members of the Top System. Organisationally, there are the higher status entities and the lower status ones. For example, in any given organisation, where do Sales, Marketing, Human Resources, Manufacturing, and Research and Development stand on the status scale? And how do these differences in status affect people’s experiences of themselves and others? Similarly, in the family, are the contributions of one spouse seen as more important to the family or of higher status than those of the other? And how do those differences affect members’ experiences?

Respect

Tops, whether they are the more or less significant members of the system, feel they are not getting adequate respect for their contributions to the system.

Trust

Tops are separate from one another’s arenas

Support

Tops feel they’re not getting support from one another, or even that they are being undermined, that others get delight from their difficulties.

Struggles over direction

The above tensions stem directly from territoriality, from the condition in which members’ areas of responsibility have grown increasingly different and separate from one another’s, from the system having become differentiated without homogenization and individuated without integration.

There is another set of tensions that can divide Tops, one that stems less from their territoriality than from the uncertainties that the system as a whole faces. Some of these were mentioned earlier, having to do with issues regarding future direction, growth, risk, culture, and such. There are no clear-cut yes or no answers to such questions, only possibilities. We could go this way or that.