Assessing Leaders at a Distancevidual to lose perspective of the overall picture "not seeing the forest
for the trees."
Decision making is either avoided, postponed, or protracted. This
springs from an inordinate fear of making a mistake, for the over-
weaning goal of the O-C personality is to leave no room for error, to
not make mistakes, to achieve perfection.
The O-C personality places a major positive value on work and
productivity, to the exclusion of pleasure and the value of interper-
sonal relationships. When pleasure is contemplated, such as a vaca-
tion, it requires a great deal of planning and must be worked for. It
is not uncommon for such individuals to keep postponing activities
that are supposed to be pleasurable. The ranks of workaholics are
heavily populated with O-C characters. But while there is intense
preoccupation with work, it is often busywork, because of the ten-
dency to become preoccupied with details. Thus an individual may
spend hours locating a misplaced list rather than recreate the list
from memory in a few minutes.
Frequently such individuals are excessively conscientious, moral-
istic, scrupulous, and judgmental of self and of others. Location in
the interpersonal hierarchy is of great importance to individuals with
this character type, and they are preoccupied with their relative sta-
tus in dominant-submissive relationships. Although oppositional
when subjected to the will of others, they stubbornly insist that oth-
ers submit to their way of doing things and are unaware of the
resentment their behavior induces in others.
These individuals have considerable difficulty showing warm and
tender feelings and are stingy both with their emotions and with
their material possessions. Their everyday relationships tend to be
serious, formal, and conventional, lacking charm, grace, spontaneity,
and humor. Wilhelm Reich (1933) has described these individuals
as "living machines."
In his classic Neurotic Styles, David Shapiro (1967) focuses on three
particular aspects of O-C cognitive style: rigidity, autonomy, and
loss of reality. The rigidity of the compulsive character leads them to
be described as dogmatic or opinionated. Such individuals are per-
ceived as uninfluenceable. It is not that they oppose contrasting
views; rather, they actively disattend to them in the service of perse-
vering with their own views. The O-C will have a sharp focus, will