John E. Jones

❚❘ DEPENDENCY AND INTIMACY
John E. Jones
Effectiveness in human relations results from the interplay among a very large number
of factors, but it is useful to think about interpersonal behavior as stemming from two
primary sources: how we are treated by others, and our own “personalities.” One
assumption underlying organization development is that how we behave in a work
setting is determined more by our reactions to the environment than by our intrinsic
personality traits (Sherwood, 1972). In general, however, B = (P, E), or, behavior is a
function of the interaction between our personalities and the environment.
There is an endless array of character traits that have been described, measured, and
cataloged. The list is so large that it appears that our selves are so complex that it is a
wonder that we can connect with one another at all. Two dimensions that subsume a
great part of our relating behaviors, however, can be studied. Dependency and intimacy
are two relatively stable characteristics of people that strongly influence their reactions
to the situations in which they find themselves with other people. Dependency refers to
our relations to other people with regard to authority, control, structure, rules, and
power. Intimacy refers to our characteristic ways of behaving in relation to other people
with regard to closeness, personalness, confidentiality, and emotional distance. Together
these two dimensions can explain a large part of the variability of people’s reactions to
the environments in which they live and work. Our characteristic ways of relating to
other people, then, result not only from who they are and the situations within which we
are relating, but also to our needs to control or to be controlled and our needs to be close
or to be distant from people. These two dimensions will be discussed in relation to each
other and in relation to effectiveness in human relations.
We characteristically think of personal traits as being linear; that is, we have more
or less of a given characteristic. Often in thinking about personal traits such as
intelligence, rigidity, need for achievement, etc., we tend to think that one end of the
linear continuum is better than the other in terms of mental health. The two traits,
dependency and intimacy, however, are not seen as linear dimensions.
Rather, they are probably most usefully conceptualized as curvilinear dimensions. If
we think of dependency in the usual linear sense we tend to think of one end of the
continuum being not dependent and the other end being dependent. Graphically, this can
be displayed as follows:
Originally published in The 1973 Annual Handbook for Group Facilitators by John E. Jones & J. William Pfeiffer (Eds.), San Diego,
CA: Pfeiffer & Company.
6 ❘❚
The Pfeiffer Library Volume 3, 2nd Edition. Copyright ©1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer