The Workplace Within: Psychodynamics of Organizational Life
Printer-friendly version| Title | The Workplace Within: Psychodynamics of Organizational Life |
| Publication Type | Book |
| Pub Year | 1990 |
| Authors | Hirschorn, L. |
| Publisher | The MIT Press |
| Keywords | anxiety, organizational ideal, organizational psychodynamics, scapegoating, vulnerability |
| Notes |
organizational psychodynamics"Irrational processes highlight the limits of classical organization theory. Theorists such as Simon, Thompson, and Galbraith* have argued that all organizations face continuing uncertainties and have suggested that organizational routines and structures, such as maintaining inventory to meet unpredictable demands for products, are mechanisms for reducing uncertainty. But because these theorists have not linked the experience of uncertainty to people's feelings of anxiety, they have posed the issue of uncertainty too narrowly and have proposed solutions that rely on such rational methods as mathematical calculation and organization design. When anxiety intrudes, rational procedures are distorted by irrational processes. For example, the managers of the manufacturing and sales departments in many companies fight chronically with one another over inventory policy, each blaming the other for the gap between market demand and company supply. Because they feel anxious, they project their sense of blame and failure outward, often scapegoating the person they must cooperate with to reduce the uncertainty they face." (p. 3) scapegoating"Although people rely on social defenses to contain their anxiety and consequently scapegoat clients, customers, or co-workers, they also desire to restore their experience of psychological wholeness and repair the real or imagined psychological damage they have done in devaluing others. This desire for reparation helps to limit the level of social irrationality in any group setting and provides a strong basis for moments of group development." (p. 10) organizational idealEmployees will be motivated to take risks, managers hope, because the image of the company will function as their inner ideal. Just as the members of a faceless crowd may feel linked to one another because they love the same idealized leader, employees who relate poorly to one another will nonetheless feel connected to one another because they are members of the same ideal company. This new culture will enable employees to short-circuit the difficult process of facing each other directly, of learning to use and to sublimate more fully their feelings when working with others by substituting a shared ideal for specific working relationships. Such a manufactured culture is dangerous because it solves the problem of a depersonalized work system by developing and sustaining a psychological culture of splitting. If the company is the new psychological ideal, what Freud called the ego-ideal, then non-company people or employees who deviate from its norms are correspondingly bad and dangerous. Such a totalitarian culture supports idealizations by ultimately hurting deviants or outsiders, leading managers, for example, to punish dissenters and disloyalists or to commit corporate crimes to protect the company. Thus, in going beyond bureaucracy, we face a branch point. We can create settings in which people can sustain the anxiety of seeing one another as both good and bad, or we can create settings in which people work together because they idealize the company and devalue outsiders." (p. 181) anxiety"People's anxiety is not simply rooted in their internal voices or private preoccupations, but reflects real threats to professional identity." (p. 47) |
| URL | http://books.google.com/books?id=gXtOfvM8TKcC |