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SUE WALSH presents the case that linking psychodynamic and organisational perspectives can offer new insights into emotional experiences at work
ORGANISATIONS provide the individual with an interpersonal arena in which, among other emotions, the experiences of love, companionship, betrayal and envy may influence performance and service delivery. Yet these experiences are barely represented in mainstream academic organisational literature.
This omission is interesting. It suggests a decoupling between the `emotional/nonrational world' of the individual and the `rational/technical' world of the organisation (Burke, 1986). This decoupling means that how it feels to work in organisations only partially connects with how they are studied.
The argument presented in this article is that we should not marginalise the complexity of emotional life within organisations. Kets de Vries (1995) argues that such complexities `raise important questions about human motivation, individual and organisational action, the nature of decision making, and the problem of change' (p.
I want to argue here for further integration between organisational and psychoanalytic theory, and to suggest that self psychology as developed by Kohut (1977) provides a useful theoretical framework in which to do this (Czander, 1993). The article will develop this argument with a particular focus on the experience of shame in the workplace.
At the outset, it is important to identify a number of interconnected stumbling blocks in the way of exploring the links between the psychodynamic world of the individual and the organisational world and vice versa. The first (and most obvious) block is that psychodynamic literature focuses on infantile experiences in a manner almost incomprehensible to those outside the psychotherapeutic world. Therefore, it is hard to accept that such a literature can say anything useful about organisational structure and function, organisational strategy and economic performance.
The second barrier lies in the different languages used within psychodynamic and organisational theory. For example, words which are everyday in the psychodynamic world such as despair, shame, envy, rage, love and attachment often raise a smirk when applied to an organisational world.
The third barrier lies in the difficulty of transferring a psychotherapeutic framework, traditionally focused on individual private dysfunction and distress, to an organisational context defined by public rationality.
This is not the article in which to respond in detail to such concerns. Rather, the...