Interpersonal relationships can be filled with chaotic elements as well as instances where relations are overly controlled or dominated by one of the participants. It is an understatement to say that people can be unpredictable. However, just as in the workplace, these chaotic elements within relationships can become the wellspring for creativity and innovation to renew and refresh the relationship. It is also not hard to find instances within relationships where interaction has come to have many gradually developed, routinized and familiar aspects that are not easy to change. They provide stability and predictability while simultaneously restricting what may be thought, felt and done. In this regard the relationship may have gradually lost its adaptiveness. It is also the case that many relationships are dominated by one individual who presumes to call all of the shots. Others must essentially submit to his or her leadership and control. And last, there are those sought for relational outcomes where the participants create a true balance between themselves that serves to create respect, trust and open communication that maintains the relationship in a dynamic and adaptive state. Life with the other person is exciting and fulfilling.

The elements of the theory provide us a cognitive map that informs our thinking about what we and others are thinking, feeling and doing. In particular, the psychologically and socially defensive nature of the interpersonal world produces many of the harder to understand and appreciate nuances that we all have encountered in our relationships. Others and we continually introduce defensiveness into the anxiety-ridden side of our relationships. Why am I mad all of the time? What in the world was the reason he or she did that to me? Underlying many of these outcomes is defensiveness that is hard to locate and most often even harder to discuss. Controlling anxiety within the relationship just as is the case in the workplace can lead to outcomes not unlike those discussed in dynamic workplace theory. Things can become chaotic and unpredictable where efforts to achieve interpersonal intimacy and some type of dependable relatedness are constantly sabotaged by unanticipated thoughts, feelings and actions. Anxieties about commitment and giving up one’s personal autonomy are at stake here. There may also be many efforts made by one participant to lay out the rules of engagement. You can do this but not that. We will do it this way, not that way. Always take off your shoes after you take out the garbage. Relationships are very often filled with constant tensions as to who may impose the rules to create predictability to allay anxiety. Similarly the anxiety that resides within relationships about who may do what to whom may in part be allayed by one person seizing control of the relationship and the other submitting. Once again anxiety-allaying predictability emerges. It may, therefore, be appreciated that many aspects of dynamic workplace theory can be observed to be present within relationships outside of the workplace.