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Issues in Management Research, and the Value of a Psychoanalytic
Perspective; Clare Huffington Kim James
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Abstract Organisation level strategies for dealing with stress are underdeveloped because it is difficult to make the transition conceptually from individual pathology to organisation systems within the main theoretical paradigms for organisation stress research. This study in a Japanese multi-national company, applies systemic and psychoanalytic theory to gain an in-depth understanding of organisation dynamics and stress. This theoretical framework allows the researchers to make sense of some of the current preoccupations in global organisations with new organisation forms. The study is also considered in relation to current issues in management research.
Introduction Stress is a current issue of concern for managers. There has been a great deal of research on causes of stress in individuals and into the kind of organisational supports that people need to cope at work. However, there has been relatively little work done on the organisation system as a whole. This perspective is needed if organisations are to understand the tension experienced in the whole system and develop more sophisticated interventions for reducing stress in the workplace. There have been a number of calls for interventions at the organisational level for stress reduction (Burke, 1993, Jaffe, 1995, MacLennon, 1992,) but there is no clear understanding of what this could mean. The organisation level has not been entirely overlooked. For example, Ivancevich et al (1990) have developed a framework for workplace stress management. Karasek and Theorell (1990) have studied the effects of job control, demands and strain. However, most studies of stress in the workplace are focused on the individual. Many studies are concerned with the organisation provision of supports for individuals (such as counselling, training and health screening), based on understanding of stress in terms of individual differences in response to stressors, appraisal of stressors and coping strategies. It is outside the scope of this paper to review these studies extensively but they are typified by studies such as Kobasa (1982) on ‘Hardiness’ and Lazarus and Folkman (1984) on coping strategies. An example of a research study based in this paradigm is that of Spector and O’Connell (1994). This study is typical in that it is tightly structured in terms of what respondents are asked and is driven by a desire to test a theory of stress in a large-scale study. It is not the intention of this paper to undermine these approaches but to suggest that there are limitations in application to new practice and theory if other approaches are not added to the research agenda. In particular, there is concern that this approach has led to a concentration on interventions that are short lived in their impact (Ganster et al, 1982). Much of the organisation level of work has focused on assessing levels of stress in the organisation and locating highly stressed departments and developing assessment tools (e.g. O’Driscoll and Cooper 1984). In our view this approach runs the risk of pathologising individuals or certain parts of the organisation. This 'absolves' the leadership of the organisation from any responsibility for attempting to understand the dynamics of stress in the system as a whole. Frameworks which treat stress as an individual phenomenon alone, seeking to explain this experience in terms of stressor- strain-moderating variables, miss the complexity of organisation life that leaves individuals vulnerable. Some people may never recover from the experience of carrying stress for the organisation and find continued employment is no longer an option. Meanwhile, stress in the organisation has not gone away, but has been passed on to other individuals. An alternative strategy could be to work out how the organisation system creates stress rather than stopping the 'pass the stress' game at the personal level. Some studies do study organisation climate as a part of the stress response (Michela et al 1995), but this still comes from the mainstream paradigm of stress research. The mainstream paradigm has been described by Kasl, (1984) as locating the origins of stress in the environment, recognising that characteristics of a person under stress interact with the objective features in the situation to produce the stress response. In this paper it is argued that this focus, whilst helpful for supporting individual through stressful periods, limits the development of theory which would lead to new understanding of stress and different stress reduction interventions. One of the reasons that organisation level strategies are underdeveloped is because it is difficult to make the transition conceptually from individual pathology to organisation systems within the main theoretical paradigms for stress research. Systemic and psychoanalytic theory applied to organisations provides a different lens from the mainstream occupational psychological theories usually the basis for stress research. A systemic and psychoanalytic theoretical basis lends itself to a research methodology that enables the researcher to gain an in depth understanding of the organisation dynamics and stress (Allcorn and Diamond, 1997, Obholzer and Roberts, 1994, James and Arroba, 1999). This understanding is potentially the basis for new forms of intervention in organisation stress. We are presenting our study at two levels; firstly, a contribution to the development of the application of psychoanalytic theory to understanding the phenomenon of organisation stress and the secondly to the process of conducting the study and the relevance of this experience to management research. We first present the research issues and then the study itself. The paper concludes with reflections on the research process and the value of the psychoanalytic approach in understanding organisation stress.
Issues for management research: research methodology Research is about the production of knowledge. In management research there is also a concern with the application of knowledge to real issues that concern managers rather than just the academic community. Thus it may be less ‘obvious’ than in the past as to what constitutes good research in this field. Gibbons et al (1994) describe mode 1 and mode 2 research. Mode 1 research is traditional knowledge production driven by the academic agenda resulting in knowledge residing in universities, with a clear distinction between fundamental research and applied. Little attention is given to how or even if this knowledge is to be used by practitioners. Mode 2 research is concerned with immediate or short-term applicability or exploitation of the knowledge research has generated, with a constant flow between fundamental and applied work, involving teamwork and trans-disciplinary approaches and existing alongside mode 1 research. The knowledge gained is intended to be useful and is the imperative behind the research. Building on Burgoyne’s (1993) phrase ‘retreat to academic fundamentalism’, Tranfield and Starkey (1998) describe the problems of academic fundamentalism; a bias to theory led research with little short-term application or interest to practitioners. Equally they describe the problems of a research agenda is driven entirely by practitioners. Such research is subject to fads, fashions and the desire for immediate results, such that the solutions have little sound basis in theory and lack systematic processes. Building on Becher (1989) they describe this as ‘epistemic drift via politics and funding’. Tranfield and Starkey believe that steering a course between the two is critical for management research. Incorporating both user and academic agendas is a key challenge in applied research. Schein addresses this in developing a clinical research perspective (1987,1993,1995). This initially derived from a seminar in which researchers at Sloan MIT were describing the knowledge they had gained about organisations. They found that they used their consulting experience more than their research to 'know' organisations. It also builds on Schein’s process consultation work. Certainly researchers are not ‘expert’ consultants with solutions to sell. However, Schein argues that client led process work can and should be considered appropriate management research. The advantage of this approach is that it is relevant to the client and builds in the notion of intervening in a system to understand it and vice versa: to understand a system one studies the impact of one’s interventions. There are a number of criteria for clinical research.
Although this research did not set out to explicitly accord with all these criteria, they accord with the values and perspective on the research undertaken here.
Issues in management research: theoretical framework An important factor in citing this approach to management research is the value placed on application to the client and the importance of inquiry involving the ‘clinician’s theory of health’. In the researchers view a systemic and psychoanalytic theory is a basis for a theory of organisation health. Method and theory are related in this approach and meet the criteria outlined by Schein. This also addresses some of the concerns about the importance of balance outlined by Tranfield and Starkey between academic fundamentalism and epistemic drift. The approach is trans-disciplinary, bringing together systems theory with psychoanalytic theory and developing a new theory of organisational emotional life. It provides the vital theoretical leap for understanding stress at the organisation level argued for in this paper. It enables a different form of research study, moving from a detached study of variables impacting on individual stress responses to one that seeks to understand interpretations of organisation experience in terms of the whole system. Together, these frameworks can explain psychological processes
Figure 1. The contextual perspective on organisational experience This can be thought of as a series of contexts or vertices (as in the diagram above) against which each can be compared, singly or in combination. The movement from one circle of context to the next involves the complex conceptual shift that has made it difficult for existing stress research to move from a consideration of individual pathology to organisation systems; for example, theories which make sense of individual behaviour may not be sufficient to explain the way individuals behave in groups or larger systems. It is outside the scope of this paper to fully outline the relevant theory from each theoretical framework. However, the ideas which seem to be most useful are briefly described below.
Individual If the individual experience of stress is thought of as unmanageable anxiety, there are 3 main types of anxiety which may be increasing because of organisational and societal change.
When anxiety becomes overwhelming, Klein (1959) suggests that early in childhood, people develop the mechanisms of splitting and projection to avoid the pain of trying to contain conflicting emotions and needs and preserve an image of oneself as good, whilst others are bad. She also refers to this as the paranoid-schizoid position, in which thinking can be concrete, rigid and growth is inhibited. This is in contrast with the depressive position where, if anxiety can be contained, in early life by the mother (Bion 1967) and the person remain in touch with the difficult realities of life, they can learn to live with and respond creatively to them.
Group When people join together in groups, they experience the tension between the wish to join and the wish to be separate, which generates anxiety. Bion (1961) describes 2 main tendencies in group life - to work with or engage with reality in the form of the task to be done, or to avoid work and retreat from it. He distinguished 3 main modes of functioning or basic assumptions underlying group behaviour - and characteristic of work avoidance.
Others have suggested further basic assumptions such as
When working in Basic Assumption mode the group is working less than optimally at the task, this puts pressure on the group as a whole and this in turn leads to further retreat into Basic Assumption mode. There is a collective experience of stress, although some individuals may be more vulnerable than others. "Treating" them will not make the group experience of stress go away. It is possible that the tendency to retreat to the individual level of functioning in organisations (encouraged by such ideas and practices as employability, personal career management etc) has made collaboration and teamwork in organisations very much more difficult.
Organisation An organisation can be considered an open system in which its boundary is open to the environment and through which it imports raw materials and exports a service or product with added value. The primary task of the organisation is to produce that service or product via some process of conversion that goes on within its boundaries. This boundary must be managed if is not to be cut off from or swamped by the environment. Within the organisation are smaller systems with their own boundaries. The task of management is therefore to control and regulate the exchanges within the organisation and across the boundary with the environment. Individuals employed by the organisation need to take up roles within the group with particular tasks so the organisation can achieve its primary task. In human systems there is a formal or task system (Task 1 or the primary task) and a sentient system (Task 2), the structuring of relationships that needs to be in place for Task 1 to be achieved, for example supervision arrangements. Whilst ideally Tasks 1 and 2 should be mutually reinforcing, the idea of social systems as a defence against anxiety (Jaques 1955) is that the primary task may create such anxiety that social structures may emerge to subvert it; for example, "more than my job’s worth" attitudes.
Environment/future This traditional way of thinking about organisation as systems contained by a boundary (Miller and Rice 1967) now appears a somewhat inadequate model for the way organisations look today. They no longer appear to have boundaries in the same way; they are more fluid, less hierarchical, dispersed from the centre and even virtual rather than concrete. They appear more like networks where the focus is less on the boundary around the organisation and more on the nature of communication around the task between the various elements in the organisation and also between different organisations for example in strategic partnerings. The task appears to contain the organisation, rather than the other way around (Hirschhorn, 1997). In this sense, people in organisations have lost the organisation as an object and may be mourning its loss and in search of a new one (Long 1998). This is illustrated in Figure 2.
As a basis of conducting research, these varied theoretical frameworks suggest a shared methodology of focussing on actual experience, both reflected and here and now experience, ‘without memory or desire’ (Bion 1984). That is, the researchers need to be open to the way people describe their thoughts and feelings, including images, dreams and fantasies and how they communicate with each other without having a fixed way of categorising or analysing them; but being prepared to create ways of understanding them with the subjects - thus producing a co-evolved reality.
Research propositions This theoretical perspective, combined with the authors’ consulting experience, led to the following propositions. Stress is caused by:
In each case, stress is a response to these changes. There are other inter-related factors and these have some overlaps: e.g. in the breakdown between Task 1 and Task 2 boundaries may become inappropriately bounded for the task. Similarly, loss of a layer in the organisation structure may be experienced as both lack of emotional containment and breakdown in Task 1/Task 2 relatedness.
The research study As part of their exploration into organisational stress the researchers ran an Organisation Stress conference at Cranfield School of Management. This conference included practitioner speakers and speakers who write from a systemic and psychoanalytic perspective on stress. After the conference the researchers wrote to all 70 participants inviting them to pursue their interest in stress with us. One way proposed was research based on the propositions that the researchers had outlined in the one-day conference and described above. Thus the research agenda was open. A senior female manager (SM) from the organisation in this study was one of the people who contacted us. The company was a Japanese multi-national. We were invited to the UK site in the South East of England and into one of the product divisions on the site in which she was based. The division sold hi tech products to the manufacturing sector. The researchers discovered that both she and the vice president (VP) to whom she reported were interested in finding out more about stress in the organisation. The SM told us she was very worried about the stress levels since a major company reorganisation a year ago. She thought the Japanese did not recognise stress as a phenomenon. Both she and her VP wanted to do something more about it and thought a research project to explore what was doing on at a deeper level in the organisation would be a good idea. This was something they could not do by themselves. Following the initial visit, in a further telephone conversation with the VP, he suggested the researchers speak to the Executive VP who managed the whole UK site. This would establish if he would support a research project and, if so, whether this would be focussed on one Division or the whole UK Group. The executive VP fully supported the project. He had personally experienced high levels of stress, and said it would be best to focus initially on the Division for which the VP was responsible and in which the SM also worked. The researchers should work out with them how to progress the study and to report back to him when we had carried it out so he could then decide if it was worth extending it across the company as a whole. The VP and SM were consulted about how to go about the study, bearing in mind the wish to interview senior managers individually, observe a top team meeting, and meet working teams, perhaps one at the boundary of the organisation and one more central to the task of the organisation. The VP and SM chose which individuals we should see, invited us to observe a senior management team meeting and chose 2 teams for us to meet; a marketing team they felt was under particular pressure and a logistics team whose job involved linking to the outside world of clients as well as internally to all parts of the organisation. The researchers saw;
The presentation of the research findings and subsequent discussion were also considered to be a data set. As an additional interview after the presentation of findings to senior managers
A total of 21 people (14 men and 7 women) were interviewed or observed or both, which represents 42% of the total staff of the Division. It was agreed that people would be interviewed individually or in groups for an hour to an hour and a half. The importance of interviewing in groups and observing groups and interactions follows from the research aims of understanding stress from a systemic organisation perspective. The research was not constructed around the revelation of individual ‘secrets’, although it later became clear that people divulged information about their feelings, whether in individual sessions or group sessions that was personally revealing. The interviews were conducted with the aim of asking about their experience in the company at the moment, about the pattern of their work, recent changes, their experience of managing and being managed, supportive factors, things that made working life more difficult and their view of the future. This was to be semi-structured but free enough to allow the researcher to follow lines of discussion that might lead from the basic questions. The questions asked were:
The interviews were to be confidential insofar as material from individuals would be used to draw out themes in trying to understand something about the organisational causes of stress. Individual data would not be fed back to the organisation. The material would be recorded in hand-written, where possible verbatim, notes or else sound recorded; quotes might be used but not attributed to individuals. It was agreed that the researchers would present a report on the findings in the form of a presentation to senior managers at the end of the process. This would contain the initial propositions to be explored, an account of what work was carried out, the findings measured against the propositions, an analysis of those findings and overall conclusions from the research, including areas the company might want to focus on for future action. It was made clear that this was commissioned research and not consultancy. Although the researchers recognised that the invitation to conduct the research, their presence in the organisation and their data collection was an intervention in the system, no consultancy such as workshops or role consultations would be undertaken. In this respect the research is different from Schein’s research/ process consultation equivalency. There was no money involved and no recommendations for change would be made; nor would the researchers be further involved after the final report. In addition to the initial meeting with the Executive VP, a total of 36 hours was spent at the company, including 2 whole days, spread over a period of 3 months, meeting individuals and groups. The final presentation of findings took place 8 months after the first contact with the Executive VP. In addition to the recorded material the researchers included as data;
This method of data collection required regular intensive meetings between the researchers to share data and compare impressions and feelings. The initial propositions were reviewed against emerging information and fresh hypotheses were worked and re-worked over time, yielding a wealth of rich and detailed data. This method requires researchers to use their self-insight and awareness of their experience as it unfolds in contact with the company and in reflection on that experience. This sharing of experience and ideas, redeveloping hypotheses was an important aspect of the rigour sought. These approaches are compatible with those requirements outlined by Schein (1993, 1995). The written data was analysed by both researchers. The statements were sorted according to how each researcher thought they related to the propositions and the stress issues explored. This process continued after the presentation with the wish to understand the significance of the UK/Japanese cultural dimension better. This led the researchers to ask to interview 2 Japanese members of staff. This was followed by a discussion with a Japanese consultant based at Cranfield with knowledge of UK and Japanese businesses as well as the company in question. The researchers developed hypotheses about the way that the Japanese aspect of the company was being used (see findings and interpretation of findings). The researchers wanted to take care with the interpretations eventually offered. Thus they could compare some of the findings against experience in other similar or different companies and to see how cultural difference might be an easy grounding for projection and fantasy. The findings from this part of the research appear as a postscript in the section on the company reaction.
The findings These are presented in the light of the initial propositions; subsequently there is a discussion of what was learned from the data to support, reject or extend these ideas in relation to the theoretical framework used for analysing the data. Increased task, personal and survival anxiety There had been many changes to the company over the last 18 months The product of the Division had suffered a global sales downturn so that, where it was once "the jewel in the crown" of the company as a whole and hardly required marketing as everyone wanted it, it was now a loss leader with rock bottom sales. There was big pressure on marketing and sales staff and increasing demands from clients for better customer service as they could easily go elsewhere to buy. As a secondary effect of plummeting sales, cost cutting meant that, if staff left, they were not being replaced and training budgets had been cut. Secondly, the Division, but not the UK Company as a whole, had been re-structured so as to be organised on a pan- European basis. This meant a change in the status of the Executive VP and VP so that they were effectively demoted and profit and loss responsibility passed to Germany. Many other functions, such as marketing and communications were also managed from Germany and several UK staff found that their line manager was actually based in a different country All the Division's business processes had been re-engineered (SAP project), so that virtually every operation in the company was now done differently. This affected the logistics staff the most. People interviewed referred constantly and with great anxiety to these changes. They were seen as overwhelmingly negative. Some quotes which illustrate this follow;
So there was a wealth of evidence to support the proposition that stress arises from anxiety caused by organisational change which is seen to threaten people personally in that their usual defences against it no longer work and it creeps into home and even night life; it also affects the way people go about their work - for some there is not enough to do and this is experienced as stressful whereas for others there is too much to do and they are not able to do it properly. Lastly, people have real fears for their jobs and the long-term survival of the company. Lack of emotional containment People seemed to feel a lack of support for their mounting anxiety at work. They said-
So the sense is of struggling on in the dark and people did not seem to have evolved many ways of dealing with their anxiety except perhaps sharing it, which apparently has its downside as the second quote indicates.
Some managers were experienced as containing and in fact seemed to see it as part of the job.
Others seemed to keep the anxiety to themselves, perhaps creating a more individualised culture than before and perhaps making it more difficult to collaborate across teams or countries to combat their problems.
It was striking in the senior management meeting that each manager had been asked for views on how to move forward as a Division. The meeting consisted of presentations from each manager with no attempt at a dialogue and jointly constructed plan of action at the end of it. Instead, the VP attempted to draw together the ideas himself. Also each presentation took a different form, strongly emphasising the individualisation of work styles; so one person used a PowerPoint slides to present his ideas, another used typed handouts, one used a moving whiteboard, yet another just spoke to the meeting. In answer to the question on what they would like to change or what their 3 wishes would be, many people gave answers that were about containment, interpreted as showing this is something they now perceive to be lacking:
The researchers found themselves being used to contain some of the anxiety in the organisation. People said they found it really helpful and relieving to be interviewed by them. Many of them said how much better they felt, having talked to the researchers, especially in the presence of colleagues. Several said they had no time at all for reflection and talking together as they are usually too busy. The researchers felt quite burdened and confused after each set of interviews. They struggled with feelings of futility and wondered if they would ever get a sense of 'what this company is all about' - or wholeness or coherence in what they were hearing. In this respect the researcher felt they were containing and reflecting some of the feelings of the people being interviewed about their experience of the organisation at the time - confusion, lack of coherence and a sense of futility says it all! The researchers also think it mattered that they were women, coming in at the invitation of managers who were perceived as caring about the staff. This may have set up expectations that they would offer a containing space and this may also have been the (unvoiced) wish of the managers in inviting them in. Breakdown between Task 1 and Task 2 It has already been seen (above) that due to massive organisational change, virtually all the structures supporting what the organisation was set up to do have disappeared, leading to a sense of chaos and confusion. An important feature of the influence of the market on the company is that the status accorded to the work done by the Division vis-à-vis other Divisions in the company was that this had also shifted by 180%, from top to bottom of the class. Furthermore, there was even a sense of confusion about Task 1; what the organisation is set up to do. Once, Task 1 in this technical/engineering company was to produce the best technical product, which would then walk off the shelves without much difficulty. Now, other companies can produce the same product to the same quality and cheaper; so the task in this company is more about marketing and selling than technical excellence. So the hierarchy within the Division which once featured engineers as top dogs and marketing and salespeople at the bottom of the heap is now in question. This occurs within a global organisation that still sees itself as an engineering organisation with relatively poor expertise in marketing and sales. Comments on this theme were very frequent:
The researchers had an interesting conversation over lunch with an engineer from another Division in the company. He said it was easy communicating over technical matters throughout the organisation and one should remember this is an engineering organisation not set up to deal with competitive markets. The Japanese approach to market downturn is to sit it out whilst monitoring it closely rather than taking any specific action, such as improving marketing. This was thought to explain the sense of powerlessness and persecution talked about. Loss of autonomy and authority in role One of the effects of the confusion about Task 1 and Task 2 seemed to be that people said they felt lacking in autonomy and in the authority to take decisions and to act within their roles. For example, they said:
What people seemed to want was more of a sense of direction and ability to carry out their roles effectively. They said they wanted:
It was possible to see signs that the changes in the business had caused stress to some groups more than others. For example, people in marketing said;
Those in sales were perceived as having an easier life.
Sales staff seemed to share this perception;
The sales staff were mainly working with established clients on 'value managed relationships' rather than trying to find new clients, which was the responsibility of the marketing staff who felt under the most pressure. The sales staff seemed to protect themselves from stress by being out of the office most of the time and by developing an individualised work pattern, blaming any problems on the marketing and logistics staff. There could sometimes be tension between these groups. For example, someone in the sales team said;
Those working in other areas said of salespeople;
The researchers heard that the internal e-mail system had become a vehicle for the expression of some of this inter-group tension. People talked of a very aggressive practice of copying others into critical messages to colleagues. One manager told us over lunch of his experience of receiving an email from Germany telling him he should be more co-operative. It was copied to 50 other people in the company but he did not know who they were. He could do nothing about this and considered the comment unfair but had no right of reply to any of those who had been copied in to the message to 'get me into trouble'. This was viewed as a regular and nasty habit in the company to ship the pain around the system. Someone said:
There was a considerable amount of frustration expressed both in relationship to Germany and Japan. The feelings towards Germany seemed to centre on resentment over lack of control that had once belonged to UK:
The company did not seem to have put in place any preparation for UK or German staff for this major reorganisation. They now have little face to face contact except over business/urgent issues. The concern over relationships with Japan seems to centre on problems of communication and understanding their priorities, except on technical matters, perhaps because of greater cultural differences. The UK staff's wishes were often for better communication with Japan. They said:
Lack of boundaries The issue of boundaries came up very early on in the first telephone contact with the Executive VP. When asked to describe the company in UK, he replied;
He then went on to explain the pan-European re-structuring of the Division, later to be spread to other divisions in the company. This created, he felt, confusion in lines of accountability and responsibility and a lack of coherence in the identity of the UK company. So that the lack of emotional containment applies in its widest sense to boundaries in the global organisation, as well as the boundary around the UK organisation and the feelings of doing work that has no meaning reported by the interviewees. A related complaint was:
This comment reflected the researchers' observations on the lack of a sense of organisational identity; the company offices seemed anonymous, without logos, mission or value statements, sales leaflets, company livery or colours. It would be impossible to tell which company one was entering as one walked in the main door and there was certainly no clue that this was a Japanese company. The presence of the researchers was not registered, except by visitors' badges, but the feeling was that they could have wandered anywhere they liked in the building without being challenged. The working areas were open plan with groups of desks, again giving no sign what the people might be working on. A TV in the reception area was tuned to Daytime TV, rather than, perhaps, a company video, and groups of staff came to watch it in breaks with their snacks and sandwiches. There were no posters on the walls apart from one advertising the film 'Titanic', which seemed to sum up many people's anxieties about the state of the company! The lack of boundaries was reflected not only in terms of the lack of boundary markers at the entry and exit point to the organisation as described above, but also at a very basic level in terms of time management. When one of us arrived late on our first long visit, this was no problem at all and the researchers were still able to meet people for as long as needed. In fact, the researchers always had to mark a time boundary as they gave the impression of being able to devote all day to meeting us. The management meeting started late and went on for a whole afternoon with no fixed agenda or chairing. The presence of the researchers was not explained and they were not introduced to all those present. In interviewing people, there was a sense of incoherence and confusion in what they said. As interviewers, it was hard not to be confused by their confusion! This seemed to correspond to the lack of authority they described in their roles. This evidence is considered to depict an organisation that has such loose boundaries that it has almost lost its separate identity. . The company reaction and where they are The researchers made a presentation to the senior managers on the research and the findings as agreed at the outset. This was to enable them to share the knowledge gained, react to the findings and discuss them and for the researchers to observe how the research was received. Thus notes were taken at this event as constituting part of the research data. After the presentation there was a general sense that the researcher had understood their experience. Some comments were
There was discussion about the company being different because of the Japanese ‘element’ and energy going into internal problems because the market conditions were so intractable. They then described a number of things they were doing differently since the beginning of the project and felt they were making positive moves. One manager asked whether this meant that they’d known all this before the project and there was a general murmur of ‘no’. One participant said
This related not just to the data collected, which had been given to us in confidence, but to the analysis offered. The project had corresponded to shifts occurring in the organisation. A nice touch was that during the discussion about the lack of boundaries and feeling of chaos in the organisation, the fire alarm test went off. One manager remarked, with barely a smile
Post-script: The Japanese dimension Although this could be a study in its own right, the researchers decided that the frequent references to the Japanese head office and culture, and the German profit centre headed by a Japanese VP required further discussion. Two Japanese staff were interviewed: one was permanently in the UK, being married to an Englishman, the other was on secondment here from Japan. The same questions were asked about stress but also how they perceived the problems of having a UK division from a Japanese perspective and cultural differences that might impact on the study. This was considered to be important in making sense of the projections and fantasies in the data. A researcher at Cranfield School of Management who is both Japanese and knowledgeable about Japanese business was also consulted. There was much agreement between these people. Some relevant points are:
The researchers did not consider these differences to explain stress and difficulties in the Company, as they were understood by at least one UK manager and if they were the basis of problems could be consciously addressed. However, they do appear to provide fertile ground for projection and fantasy.
Analysis of findings from a systems and psychoanalytic perspective The findings appear to demonstrate that changes in the company’s market environment dramatically affecting its view of the future have caused disruption and consequently stress at the organisation, group and individual boundaries. Boundaries can be thought of here in several ways:
The evidence suggests that changes in the environment have produced mutually interacting ripples at all contextual boundaries -–between individual and group, group and organisation, organisation and environment and every possible comparison. These changes have had the effect of deconstructing organisational identity to such an extent that the felt boundary with the environment is more at individual or group level than at the level of the organisation. A further circle of context, the global dimension not previously mentioned but coinciding with company changes, was the collapse of the Asian financial market. This led to uncertainty about the ability of the parent company to survive. Perceptions of the parent company as invulnerable were under threat. The position of being a ‘favoured child’ working for an idealised but distant father has now changed; people perhaps see themselves as failing, naughty children being persecuted by a neglectful, weak father. What was once tolerated in Japanese business practice is now intolerable and denigrated. Some of the anger is displaced onto Germany in this search for a surrogate entity to function as a good or bad object, and the Germans are nearer geographically and easier to communicate with. An example of this would be calling the Germans "control freaks" which could presumably equally apply to Japan. The sense is of impotent rage, passivity and concreteness that inhibits thinking and creative responses and is typical of the paranoid-schizoid position. The more senior the staff in the organisation, the more likely it was that people seemed to feel the lack of an organisational boundary, culminating in the executive VP’s comments about the organisation no longer being a recognisable entity. The ability to work with a sense of the organisation as good or bad as an object is now very difficult or deconstructed. The search for the primary task as some kind of container is also problematic now that this has migrated too; from a focus on production to marketing. One of the demonstrations of the frustration around this dilemma is the tension between working groups illustrating a fight-flight dynamic, of which one symptom is the destructive use of e-mail. The turn inwards to a more individualistic response (for example the managers’ presentations at the senior management meeting) and the pleas for containment appear to represent the perception of no boundary between the individual and the crowd and primitive fears associated with the large group. This ‘me-ness’ (Lawrence et al 1996) in turn makes collective action impossible and reinforces the sense of a lack of the organisation. The consequences for leadership are clearly devastating in that the identity of the leader crucially depends on their being an organisation with a boundary against which to negotiate the leadership role. It was clear to the researchers that, the more senior the staff member, the more stressed they felt. The Executive VP described his only work satisfaction being in the voluntary work he did outside the office and the VP said he was only sustained by his grandchildren and hobbies. By the time of the presentation of the research to senior managers, the researchers learned that the Executive VP and one of the senior managers had left the organisation. The position of the more junior staff could be represented as in Figure 3 below.
No organisational boundaries are apparent; inter-group pressures are high. Individuals seek a good or bad object at the group level to cope with anxiety flooding in from the environment. The position of the senior staff could be represented as in Figure 4 below.
No group or organisational boundaries are apparent. The individual is open to the environment - the competitive market. He or she is open to large group processes – exposure to primitive fears and doubts about personal identity, competence and value. The researchers could only feel pessimistic about the future of the company because, whilst the research had provided temporary containment of anxiety, it was insufficient to provide the kind of sustained reflective space necessary for coping, survival and ultimately a creative response to the chaos.
Conclusions This paper has set out to demonstrate that if new approaches to organisational stress are to be developed, a different theoretical and research framework is required which goes beyond stress as individual pathology. The study has shown that the application of systemic and psychoanalytic theory and related methodology has revealed that the disturbance in the system that produces stress is not solely within the individual. It is located at the boundaries between different parts of the system (individual and group, group and organisation etc). Changes in the environment produce ripples at all levels in the system. As old boundaries loosen or disappear, and new boundaries are in the process of being created, members of organisations can feel exposed and vulnerable individually, as a group or as an organisation. This is a potentially creative moment in the life of the organisation if it is not overtaken by what Lawrence and Armstrong (1997) describe as psychotic thinking; thinking which is primarily defensive, concerned with maintaining the status quo and thus out of touch with reality. Since the organisation is in a state of high levels of anxiety, their thinking tends to be more paranoid than creative. In the study presented in this paper it was ‘easier’ to see the problem and potential solutions as lying outside the immediate system. The use of the systemic and psychoanalytic framework in the research study enabled the phenomenon of stress to be explored in a way that was not simply an extension or test of existing frameworks for understanding stress. Neither was it only focussed on intervening in the organisation studied to produce a solution rather than an understanding of their stress. The research has thus produced a contribution to knowledge of stress at work and also has practical implications. Some examples of practical outcomes were suggested to the organisation in the final presentation made by the researchers. Given the researcher’s diagnosis that the organisation was in a paranoid-schizoid position and would be focussed on survival rather than development, the suggestions were concrete and not too confrontational;
Support structures-developing those that are really needed and building on those that exist or in the process of being adopted (building on those that were offered in the research process)
The study also reveals some new challenges for international companies. This Company had been a long established multi-national and had traditions for operating world wide; the model was a Japanese HQ and self contained units in each country in which they operated. However, a big change was introduced by creating a pan European organisation with its profit/loss and marketing leadership in Germany and its sales in many countries of which the UK was one, and yet still with an HQ in Japan. This ‘global’ organisation challenged boundary integrity at all levels. This is an issue for all organisations that are struggling to become global operations, especially if they are moving from a multi-national model to a global enterprise.
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