More so when you can't even head home at the end of the day for a Chinese and full control of the remote. Waking up to see the managing director's head on the pillow beside yours can be an even more frightening prospect . . . and can mean more than just that a few too many bottles were dredged the night before.

Maybe he's your husband, or, apparently, worse still, maybe she's your wife.

Research shows that many wives report lower levels of satisfaction within their family business if they have a leading decision-making role.

In a study by Danes & Morgan (2004) of family businessowning couples, husbands reported identity crises and role confusion trying to balance their business alongside their family needs, while meeting the expectations (or not) of the business partner/spouse and, heaven forbid, siblings as well.

In-laws who marry into an existing family business can fare even worse . . . initially at least, feeling isolated from their spouse, as they are unfamiliar with the distinct 'family business' mindset those who grew up with the dual role have.

Working with the wife, the siblings or the parents is the norm for a huge number of Irish companies, where in the SME sector the family firm is the backbone of industry.

Family-run companies around the globe often do better than their non-family counterparts as the best of the blood relationships, when applied to business, can foster a robustness and resilience not known to regular employee groups.

However, families are entities onto themselves, and when that organic dynamic is brought to the corporate table, all sorts of mayhem can ensue; it's not a natural progression that profit will make families more business-like, or that soft skills and cushioned politesse, thought to be the foundation stones of family life, will be delivered to the treacherous world of business.

The merging of the two distinct systems of family and organisation means that sometimes the grey area of overlap makes for little more than high stress, low satisfaction and lots of fighting both in and outside the work/family settings.

As everyone tiptoes up and down a parallel universe, duplicities are multiplied by blood and buck so that it's all one vast Machiavellian nightmare devoid of trust, floundering in a cesspit of lies, secrets and petty deceits.

That's the worst-case scenario, granted.

The repose offered by trust within the family unit will likely be absent in the office, while the office politics and subterfuge fundamental to business life and enacted daily in the boardroom will play out at home to your peril.

Whether or not families and businesses should move in the same circles is down to their ideals and 'agenda integration'. How do the human values move across both domains and how much is the family prepared to compromise for the business and vice versa?

At one level, each system wants to erase the other, it being a form of competition, and each seeks to reinvent their history, integrating relationships and roles, so that an image is created which fits our ideal of what both the family and the business should really be like.

Our idealised working role wants the family dynamic to do it by the book so that who puts the bins out becomes a topic for over-considered, committee-style debate. Thus a project management approach invades the living room and flicking to Channel Four at whim can mean serious home relations unrest and anticipated settee partnership fall-out.

Doing a Swot analysis of the kids' new school over dinner can really mess up family life and make for a tense time for the offspring of parents who work together. Too much management-speak blinding everyone to the haphazard chaos that's supposed to permeate family life means all the norms are disrupted and real people get lost.

Whereas promoting and desiring a 'listening and loving' interpersonal style at home is good for families, it's not helpful at work. The family and the organisation pursue distinctly different goals and employ very different methods . . . a tendency towards censorship and the curtailment or free speech often being the only commonality to both.

International business analyst and writer Dana Telworth shows that family businesses can thrive only when they adhere to four rules of survival.

In order to accommodate the non-aligned needs of each, those who work with family members should be conscious of the fact that their terrain is challenging and requires a careful approach if the best of both worlds is to be fostered.

Many family businesses thrive in the first generation, develop and even expand when taken over by the second generation, yet most fail to make it to the third generation. According to Telford, this is usually because they break the four golden rules of engagement. The rules are:

1: Agree the aims and objectives of the organisation. This should include agreed values, so that everyone knows what is fundamental to the people involved.

2: Base reward on merit.

Nobody's equal, even within families, he claims, so promote differentials, reward good business actions, not blood ties.

3: Have a clear procedure for communicating. Family therapy meets business analysis:

don't concentrate on the 'issue' causing a split, concentrate on the communicating process and practise it.

Then use it frequently.

4: Hire independent facilitators at times, particularly for strategically important decisions, succession planning and business shifts. Only a non-family member will give an unbiased view and, most importantly, only he or she will be seen to be unbiased.