This article celebrates the vitality of the systems psychodynamic approach and its potential to humanize organization studies, management practice, and working lives. An approach is a deliberate movement: a way to move closer to, inquire about, and deal with something. The systems psychodynamic approach involves moving closer to organizations and workers through research and educational efforts to study and manage the unconscious dynamics of organizing. It aims to reveal the fears, needs, and wishes that underpin rigid structures and dysfunctions in groups, organizations, and institutions—and to foster more adaptive and functional ways of dealing with those impulses. Advocates refer to this approach as ‘the work’. This article tells the story of the work as we understand it. We tell it as a life, to highlight the work’s intent and evolution, its struggles and contributions, but mostly to make the point that the work is alive. It is alive as an academic enterprise and it is a way of life. An approach devoted to dismantling defenses, countering authoritarianism, and nurturing development and democracy, we argue, is more relevant than ever. And so is what we see as the purpose of the work: fostering pluralism without polarization in human relations.

Through an inductive study of learning and development (L&D) executives in 69 multinational organizations, we build a theory of marginal leaders’ conception of learning in organizations. We found that, as marginal leaders, L&D executives lacked an established template for their leader identity and had to navigate conflicting prescriptions for their function. The conception of learning—a process that involved finding a place in relation to significant counterparts, taking a stance on learning, and building learning spaces—allowed them to craft identities that gave meaning and direction to their work, grounding their identity as leaders. Not all marginal leaders took the same trajectory toward firm ground for their identities. Some left the margins to lead, embracing either an instrumental or a humanistic view of their function. Others learned to lead from the margins, casting that duality as a paradox. Taking a systems psychodynamic approach to examine marginal leaders’ trajectories through a defining duality, this study reveals the interplay between existential and strategic layers of leader identity construction. Theorizing the conception of learning as the process through which leadership comes to life and becomes organized, the study expands and bridges the literatures on leader identity and on the management of dualities.

Academics have lamented that practitioners do not always adopt scientific evidence in practice, yet while academics preach evidence-based management (EBM), they do not always practice it. This paper extends prior literature on difficulties to engage in EBM with insights from behavioral integrity (i.e., the study of what makes individuals and collectives walk their talk). We focus on leader development, widely used but often critiqued for lacking evidence. Analyzing 60 interviews with academic directors of leadership centers at top business schools, we find that the selection of programs does not always align with scientific recommendations nor do schools always engage in high-quality program evaluation. Respondents further indicated a wide variety of challenges that help explain the disconnect between business schools claiming A but practicing B. Behavioral Integrity theory would argue these difficulties are rooted in the lack of an individually owned and collectively endorsed identity, an identity of an evidence-based leader developer (EBLD). A closer inspection of our data confirmed that the lack of a clear and salient EBLD identity makes it difficult for academics to walk their evidence-based leader development talk. We discuss how these findings can help facilitate more evidence-based leader development in an academic context.

This article reviews the history, foundations, development, and position of systems psychodynamic scholarship in organization studies. Systems psychodynamic scholarship focuses on the interaction between collective structures, norms, and practices in social systems and the cognitions, motivations, and emotions of members of those systems. It is most useful to investigate the unconscious forces that underpin the persistence of dysfunctional organizational features and the appeal of irrational leaders. It is also well equipped to challenge arrangements that stifle individual and organizational development. The article documents the tension, in this body of work, between an “outside-in” perspective, focused on institutions’ influence on individuals, and an “inside-out” perspective, focused on leaders’ influence on institutions. It also interrogates the marginalization of systems psychodynamic scholarship, positing that its marginality is both a social defense for organization studies as a whole and a generative feature of the systems psychodynamics approach. Granting it a position of functional, rather than oppressed, marginality, the article concludes, will enrich research about the experience, management, and organization of contemporary work.

For over half a century, systems psychodynamic scholars have been ‘sexting’ organization science, in short quips and long form, with mixed reception. This article chronicles their ambivalent relationship and argues that making it closer and more overt would benefit organization theory and organizations. It begins by tracing the history of using science as a cover for an  instrumental ideology in organizations and their study. It is a history, the article contends, that is repeating itself with the advance of algorithmic capitalism. The article makes the case for a systems psychodynamic stance as a form of progress and protest, a way to embrace science’s methodical pursuit of truth while countering its dehumanizing potential. Taking this stance, it argues, might lead to more humane organization studies. That is, to more meaningful accounts of, and more useful theories about, the issues facing organizations, organizing, and the organized today. Finally, the article elaborates how systems psychodynamics can help humanize three areas of scholarship – those on identities, leadership, and institutions – and concludes with a call for celebrating, rather than tolerating, subjectivity in organization theory

Building on an inductive, qualitative study of independent workers—people not affiliated with an organization or established profession—this paper develops a theory about the management of precarious and personalized work identities. We find that in the absence of organizational or professional membership, workers experience stark emotional tensions encompassing both the anxiety and fulfillment of working in precarious and personal conditions. Lacking the holding environment provided by an organization, the workers we studied endeavored to create one for themselves through cultivating connections to routines, places, people, and a broader purpose. These personal holding environments helped them manage the broad range of emotions stirred up by their precarious working lives and focus on producing work that let them define, express, and develop their selves. Thus holding environments transformed workers’ precariousness into a tolerable and even generative predicament. By clarifying the process through which people manage emotions associated with precarious and personalized work identities, and thereby render their work identities viable and their selves vital, this paper advances theorizing on the emotional underpinnings of identity work and the systems psychodynamics of independent work.

Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of 55 managers engaged in mobile careers across organizations, industries, and countries, and pursuing a one-year international master’s of business administration (MBA), we build a process model of the crafting of portable selves in temporary identity workspaces. Our findings reveal that contemporary careers in general, and temporary membership in an institution, fuel people’s efforts to craft portable selves: selves endowed with definitions, motives, and abilities that can be deployed across roles and organizations over time. Two pathways for crafting a portable self—one adaptive, the other exploratory—emerged from the interaction of individuals’ aims and concerns with institutional resources and demands. Each pathway involved developing a coherent understanding of the self in relation to others and to the institution that anchored participants to their current organization while preparing them for future ones. The study shows how institutions that host members temporarily can help them craft selves that afford a sense of agentic direction and enduring connection, tempering anxieties and bolstering hopes associated with mobile working lives. It also suggests that institutions serving as identity workspaces for portable selves may remain attractive and extend their cultural influence in an age of workforce mobility.

This article examines how and why business schools might be complicit in a growing disconnect between leaders, people who are supposed to follow them, and the institutions they are meant to serve. We contend that business schools sustain this disconnect through a dehumanization of leadership that is manifested in the reduction of leadership to a set of skills and its elevation to a personal virtue. The dehumanization of leadership, we suggest, serves as a valuable defense against, but a poor preparation for, the ambiguity and precariousness of leadership in contemporary workplaces. We propose ways to humanize leadership by putting questions about the meaning of leadership—its nature, function, and development—at the center of scholarly and pedagogical efforts. Reflecting on our attempts to do so, we argue that it involves revisiting not just theories and teaching methods, but also our identities as scholars and instructors.

Courses that aim to foster reflection and personal development in the service of leaders’ development are increasingly popular within MBA curricula and executive education portfolios. We explore the process through which these courses enrich their institutional context and enhance students’ ongoing development and practice of leadership. Through an inductive, qualitative study of the Personal Development Elective, an offering within the leadership curriculum of an international MBA that gives students the option to work with a psychotherapist, we develop a model of how the interplay between the regressive and holding features of an intensive management program foster the personalization of management learning. The personalization process, we posit, allows management education to provide the foundations for leaders’ development by transforming potentially regressive experiences into material for participants’ personal learning, experimentation, and growth.

This paper employs a psychodynamic perspective to examine the development and maintenance of a leader’s identity, building on the premise that such identity work involves both conscious and unconscious processes. We focus on the latter by suggesting that those in coveted leadership roles may engage in projective identification to shape and sustain an identity befitting those roles. Projective identification is the unconscious projection of unwanted aspects of one’s self into others, leading to the bolstering of a conscious self-view concordant with one’s role requirements. Recipients of a leader’s projections may manage these by projecting them back into the leader or into third parties, which may lead to ongoing conflict and the creation of a toxic culture. We use examples from the Gucci family business to illustrate this process.

Identity has emerged as a potent force in understanding leadership. This chapter reviews the contributions of role identity, social identity, and social construction theories toward comprehending the emergence, effectiveness, and development of leaders. In recent years leadership scholars have combined two or more of these identity theories to conceptualize and study a range of phenomena including transitions into leadership roles, the challenges faced by women leaders, and the role of identity workspaces in leadership development. Based on the authors’ review they propose areas where further research attention is needed, in particular the process by which non-prototypical leaders emerge, lead effectively, and develop; leader identities in contemporary settings characterized by globally distributed teams and multiple leadership roles; and identity evolution in the context of the life cycle of a leadership career. 

Profound changes in individuals’ relationship with their employers and expectations for their work lives have generated an increasing demand for leadership development, while at the same time exposing the limitations of traditional leadership programs focused on the acquisition of conceptual knowledge and requisite skills. This chapter explores how conceptualizing leadership programs as “identity workspaces” helps to meet the demand for leadership in ways that benefit individuals, organizations, and society. Alongside the acquisition of knowledge and skills, identity workspaces facilitate the revision and consolidation of individual and collective identities. They personalize and contextualize participants’ learning, inviting them to wrestle with the questions “What does leading mean to us?” and “Who am I as a leader?” Attention to both activity and identity deepens and accelerates the development of individual leaders and strengthens leadership communities within and across organizations.

At first glance, hierarchy may seem difficult to praise. Bureaucracy is a dirty word even among bureaucrats, and in business there is a widespread view that managerial hierarchy kills initiative, crushes creativity, and has therefore seen its day. Yet 35 years of research have convinced me that managerial hierarchy is the most efficient, the hardiest, and in fact the most natural structure ever devised for large organizations. Properly structured, hierarchy can release energy and creativity, rationalize productivity, and actually improve morale. Moreover, I think most managers know this intuitively and have only lacked a workable structure and a decent intellectual justification for what they have always known could work and work well.

It has often been noted that many social phenomena show a strikingly close correspondence with psychotic processes in individuals. Melitta Schmideberg for instance, has pointed to the psychotic content of many primitive ceremonies and rites. And Bion has suggested that the emotional life of the group is only understandable in terms of psychotic mechanisms. My own recent experience has impressed upon me how much institutions are used by their individual members to reinforce individual mechanisms of defence against anxiety, and in particular against recurrence of the early paranoid and depressive anxieties first described by Melanie Klein. In connecting social behaviour with defence against psychotic anxiety, I do not wish in any way to suggest that social relationships serve none other than a defensive function of this kind. Instances of other functions include the equally important expression and gratification of libidinal impulses in constructive social activities, as well as social co-operation in institutions providing creative, sublimatory opportunities. In die present paper, however, I propose to limit myself to a consideration of certain defensive functions; and in so doing I hope to illustrate and define how the mechanisms of projective and introjective identification operate in linking individual and social behaviour.

The idea of social defenses against paranoid and depressive anxiety has grown from a working hypothesis put forward by Jaques in 1955 into a theory of social defenses against the distressing and unbearable emotions aroused by organizational tasks and dynamics. Jaques reneged on his early ideas, dismissing psychodynamic causes and embracing structural explanations. But the application of social defense theory beyond micro-systems to broader systems dynamics has meant that psychodynamic and
structural ideas of system and role have now become more integrated. Organizations contain many systems: task, political, social, technical. The community system level of organization is explored. When not consciously recognized as a system, people are unable to actively take up roles as citizens of the organization. Lack of recognition or assertion of such roles leaves subjectivity under threat. This is yet another source of social defenses. These ideas are explored through reference to inter-subjective theory. 

Many years ago, I published a paper, "Social Systems as Defence Against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety" (Klein, Heimann, & Money-Kyrle, 1955), in which I laid a great deal of emphasis upon the collusive actions by individuals to concoct organizations as a means of defense against psychotic anxieties, and thereby generating a fundamental cause of problems within those organizations. Accumulating field experience led to my rejection of that view some years later, since when it has been my working assumption that it is badly organized social systems that arouse psychotic anxieties and lead to their disturbing acting out and expression in working relationships. The reason we have bad or dysfunctional organizations is not a reflection of pathological psychological forces to be understood and resolved by the application of psychoanalytical concepts and methods. Far from it. The reason is that there has never been an adequate foundation of understanding of organizations per se. We have simply not yet learned how to construct adequate organizations. That job is only just beginning.

The choice of good leaders is a major task for all organizations. Information regarding the prospective administrator's personality should complement questions regarding his previous experience, his general conceptual skills, his technical knowledge, and the specific skills in the area for which he is being selected. The growing psychoanalytic knowledge about the crucial importance of internal, in contrast to external, object relations, and about the mutual relationships of regression in individuals and in groups, constitutes an important practical tool for the selection of leaders.

A comparison is made between the field of organizational psychology as I saw it in 1965 and how I see it today. Many issues remain the same, but the field is more differentiated, fragmented, and individualized than ever, despite culture, especially national culture, having become a big topic. The field is much larger and has spawned a whole applied field of organization development and new methods of experiential learning. The biggest change has been the decline of work on group dynamics and group interventions reflecting Western cultures of individualism. At the same time, task complexity, interdependency, multiculturalism, social responsibility, and new forms of organization have become new challenges for consultants and researchers because they require relationship building, coordination, and group work.

In this article, we present an overview of the literatures on organizational identity and organizational identification. We provide overviews of four major approaches to organizational identity: functionalist, social constructionist, psychodynamic, and postmodern. The literature on organizational identification, by contrast, exhibits greater consensus due to the hegemonic power of social identity theory, and is predominantly functionalist. We review recent research on organizational identification regarding performance outcomes and antecedents (mainly focusing on leadership and the social exchange perspective), and in relation to change and virtual contexts. Some suggestions for further research are then offered. .

A theory of leadership development is advanced, suggesting that changes in leadership skills may be viewed from the perspective of a general theory of learning and expertise, with consideration of the associated changes in information processing and underlying knowledge structures that occur as skill develops. More specifically, we propose that leadership performance is organized in terms of a progression from novice to intermediate to expert skill levels. At each skill level, the emphasis is on qualitatively different knowledge and information processing capabilities. In addition, because leadership skill development requires proaction on the part of the leader, we propose that identity, meta-cognitive processes, and emotional regulation are critical factors in developing the deeper cognitive structures associated with leadership expertise. Finally, expert leaders may develop unique skills in grounding their identities and leadership activities in coherent, self-relevant, authentic values.

"I am therefore almost inclined to suggest that you require from your laureates an oath of humility, a sort of hippocratic oath, never to exceed in public pronouncements the limits of their competence. Or you ought at least, on conferring the prize, remind the recipient of the sage counsel of one of the great men in our subject, Alfred Marshall, who wrote: 'Students of social science, must fear popular approval: Evil is with them when all men speak well of them'".