Reflections on Groups and Organizations

On the Couch With Manfred Kets de Vries

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780470742471
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119965978
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Reflections on Groups and Organizations is the third and final book in the On the Couch with Manfred Kets de Vries series.

Broadening the Kets De Vries canvas, this book examines concepts of organizational health, performance, and change. Material ranges from studies of high performance teams – based on time the author spent with the pygmies of central Africa – to the study of organizational stars, to the use of coaching interventions to improve personal and organizational functioning.

Kets de Vries looks at the interpersonal and group processes that determine how organizations work within specific contexts, including family firms. He studies dysfunctional leader-follower relationships, downsizing, and organizational transformation. Kets de Vries also introduces his concept of the "authentizotic" organization – a pleasant, healthy, well-functioning workplace.

PART 1: INTERPERSONAL AND GROUP PROCESSES

INTRODUCTION

In her book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995) the writer and jour­nalist Gitta Sereny retells Albert Speer’s account of his father’s visit to his office to see the maquette his son had made of Hitler’s new Berlin—the world capital that would be the seat of government for the Thousand Year Reich. Speer’s father, also an architect, had previously been dis­missive about his son’s skills but since his son had become the Fuehrer’s architect, had become proud of his success. However, his reaction to the maquette was unexpected: ‘He stood and looked at the model for a long moment. Then he said, “You’ve all gone completely insane,” and walked out … But it didn’t end there. The next evening he came to the theater with me. Hitler sat in the box across from ours and sent his aide to say that if the old gentleman with me was my father, he would like to meet him. As soon as my father stood facing Hitler, I saw him pale and tremble—his whole body shuddered as if he had the ague … Stupidly, I thought he was just unbearably moved’ (Sereny, 1995, p. 158). Speer reflected later that he believed his father had ‘somehow felt that night that other “id” in Hitler … and from then on he identified me with that madness too’ (Sereny, 1995, pp. 158–9).

Speer senior was right, of course, but by the time of this encounter things had gone too far. Hitler’s preference had Speer happily in thrall: ‘Hitler became my life … I just accepted … that I was going to have a wonderful life, wonderful beyond any dreams’ (Sereny, 1995, p. 106). The man who had worked himself and others 24 hours a day for nine months to deliver the new Chancellery building two days ahead of schedule (a project a fellow architect said should have taken nine years) would turn his awesome capacity for work and his logistical brilliance to Hitler’s war effort—with the result that, despite intense Allied bombing in the final year of the war, German armaments production actually increased.

Albert Speer, like the others in Hitler’s immediate coterie, was caught up in an extreme expression of folie à deux—a blanket term that describes far more than its literal ‘madness shared by two’: it can signify a wide range of delusional beliefs and actions. Although its clinical classification is dependency psychotic disorder, or induced delusional disorder, folie à deux is still more generally used in psychiatric literature.

Folie à deux can lend itself to farce, as well as tragedy. The 2008 film Be Kind Rewind is the story of a luckless video store employee who inadvertently erases the entire stock of the store. Desperate to keep the disaster from his absent employer, and keep his customers happy, he enlists the help of friends to remake the movies. The new versions swiftly develop a cult following and when the store owner returns and discovers that the ersatz movies do better business than the originals, he collaborates with the deception. Justice finally arrives with a prosecution for copyright violation but not before the culprits prove that you can fool some of the people all of the time.

In the first chapter of this book, I describe how folie à deux can work in an organizational context, examining how individuals’ activity or passivity and tendency toward conformism can contribute to the process. I look at the checks and balances organizations can use to forestall and manage dysfunctional leader–follower relationships, as well as the self-monitoring we can all use to assess our susceptibilities.

Chapter 2 brings together my reflections on a key element of my work and is an attempt to explain why I believe it is essential to understand the way human dynamics work within organizations. I am bound to regret, after a career built on advocating the clinical psychodynamic approach, that there is still resistance to its implementation. I believe that the refusal to acknowledge the value of a psychoanalytical approach to organizational behavior is a serious handicap to modern management scholarship and practice. In this chapter, I make a defense of psychoanalytic principles and argue that unconscious dynamics have a significant impact on life in organizations, urging organizational leaders to recognize and plan for them.

I begin by addressing some key issues: Why do organizations attempt to function on the basis that executives are logical, rational, dependable human beings? And why does the belief persist that management is a rational task performed by rational people according to rational organizational objectives? Isn’t it time we confronted and dismissed these myths once and for all? In this context, I take a close look at the psychology of groups and apply this to the organizational setting. People in organizations operate on the assumption of rationality and normal functioning but this assumption is deeply untrue: we all bring our personal quirks, idiosyncracies, dysfunctions, and neuroses with us into the workplace. We have our own conscious behaviors and we observe and respond to those of others—but our outer performance is governed by our responses to our inner unconscious pro­cesses. Below the surface, something quite different may be going on.

There is a Sufi tale about a man who noticed a disturbing bump under a rug. He tried everything to flatten the rug, smoothing, rubbing and squashing the bump, but it kept reappearing. Finally, frustrated and furious, the man lifted up the rug, and to his great surprise, out slid a very angry snake. In an organizational context, this story can be viewed as a metaphor for the occasions when interventions fail because they deal only with the symptoms and do not recognize the real underlying problem. Inevitably, attempts to smooth things over will leave the snake underneath the rug, working its mischief. As coaches, consultants, and change agents we should be pulling the snake out from under the rug and dealing with it. If we don’t, it will confound our best efforts to improve organizational efficiency. I present the case for clinically informed organizational interventions by people trained in applying the psychodynamic approach to group situations, illustrating my arguments with a case history drawn from my own practice.

Readers of the previous book in this series¹ will know that I have always been drawn to physical challenges, especially exploration in extreme conditions. A few years ago I had the opportunity to spend some time with the pygmies in the rain forest of Cameroon. The pygmy peoples of central Africa are hunter-gatherers whose way of life is increasingly threatened by discrimination, deforestation, and intermarriage with other African ethnic groups. I stayed with the Baka pygmy, followed them in their hunting, shared their accommodation, and observed their interaction over several days. Their survival is dependent on a highly evolved group system that is characterized by trust and respect, protection and support, open communication, rapid resolution of conflict, common goals, shared values and beliefs, putting the needs of the group before the needs of the individual, and distributed leadership. I gained some fascinating insights about the functioning of high-performance groups from this experience, which I later formulated as some key lessons for organizational teams. In Chapter 3, I show how those key values are demonstrated among the pygmies and how they can be applied to the composition and functioning of high-performance teams within organizations.

The chapters in this first part of the book draw on some wide-ranging examples to illustrate group dynamics, from devastatingly dysfunctional to high-functioning. In the next section, I will look at how organizations accommodate their people, how they look after them—or fail to do so—during difficult times, and how organizational life is both enhanced and complicated within family firms.

Note

¹ Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2009) Reflections on Leadership and Career Development. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

CHAPTER 1

FOLIE À DEUX: ACTING OUT YOUR SUPERIOR’S FANTASIES¹

… We shouldn’t overlook the argument that folly finds favor in heaven because she alone is granted forgiveness of sins, whereas the wise man receives no pardon. So when men pray for forgiveness, though they may have sinned in full awareness, they make folly their excuse and defense.

—Erasmus, In Praise of Folly

Experience—the wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

—Ambrose Bierce

You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.

—Robin Williams

Folly enlarges men’s desires while it lessens their capacities.

—Robert South

POWER IN THE LEADER–SUBORDINATE RELATIONSHIP

In psychiatric literature, the idea of mental contagion is a recurring theme (Christakis and Fowler, 2009). Folie à deux originally referred to a seriously disturbed relationship between two people that involved spreading mental processes from one person to another (and was viewed as being limited to the behavior of individuals within families). However, as we will see from examples in this chapter, it can also be a collective phenomenon whereby groups of individuals are influenced by the delusions of one affected person.

Senior executives should never underestimate the degree of influence they wield in organizations. Given the fact that dependency—the need for direction—is one of man’s most universal characteristics, managers need to be aware that their subordinates might in certain circumstances go so far as to sacrifice reality for its sake. To preserve such a dependency, both subordinates and superiors can create closed communities, losing touch with the immediate reality of the organization’s environment. Subordinates will, on occasion, willingly participate in even irrational decisions without challenging what is happening.

It is my hypothesis that folie à deux is a regularly occurring phenomenon in organizations and, indeed, can be considered one of the hazards of leadership. I would argue that it has received less attention than it deserves because within relatively isolated organizational environments there is often a high degree of tolerance for unusual or eccentric behavior. However, I believe that by studying emotionally charged superior–subordinate relationships characterized by some kind of impaired ability to see things realistically, one can often gain insight into what is frequently excused as just an ‘eccentric’ leadership style.

In fact, notable examples of such behavior can be found throughout history, and two clear illustrations are the FBI under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, and what happened between Hitler and his close followers in the last days of World War II. I will explore both of these in a little more detail.

HOOVER AND THE FBI

As an administrator, J. Edgar Hoover struck many as an erratic autocrat, banishing agents to Siberian posts for the most whimsical reasons and terrorizing them with so many rules and regulations that adherence to all of them was impossible (Schott, 1975; Cox and Theoharis, 1988). Hoover viewed his directorship as infallible; subordinates soon learned that dissent equaled disloyalty. No one could risk ignoring his slightest whim. For example, non-participation in an anti-obesity program was likely to incur his wrath, and rumor had it that chauffeurs had to avoid making left turns while driving him. It was said that his car had once got struck by another car when he was making a left turn but, according to others, ‘left’ reminded Hoover of communists.

Any trivial, unimportant, or unclear order originating from Hoover had to be acted upon and subordinates could expect trouble if they did not take directives seriously. These directives often assumed a life of their own. Only slavish obedience to the rules, and statistics—level of fines, number of convictions, fugitives apprehended—counted. Problems arose if these figures did not increase year on year.

Naturally, those agents who embraced the concept of the director’s omnipotence were more likely to succeed. To ensure compliance, inspectors would be sent out to field offices in search of violations (the breaking of some obscure rule or instruction). If a contract was out on a special agent in charge of the office, a violation would inevitably be found. The future of the inspectors themselves would be at stake if no violations were discovered because a contract might be issued in turn on them. Participation in these absurdities was unavoidable if people wanted to survive within the organization. However, many of these bizarre activities seem to have been treated as quite normal aspects of organizational life and were carried out with great conviction.

HITLER AND THE FALL OF BERLIN

The folie à deux displayed by Hitler and his followers was particularly clear during the last months of the war. Isolated in his bunker in Berlin at this time, Hitler withdrew into his fantasies, now more than ever inhabited by delusions. Encouraged by an intimate clique of old party members (particularly Bormann, Goebbels, and Ley),² he increasingly denied the reality of the approaching end (Speer, 1971). Even six weeks before Germany’s total unconditional surrender, Speer tells how Hitler participated in an armaments conference during which nonexistent crude steel production, quotas for anti-tank guns, and the employment of imaginary new super-weapons were discussed. At such conferences, the dismal record of the previous war years was attributed to treason and sabotage by army officers. But, it was argued, since these traitors had now been exposed, the situation would be turned around. Victory was near.

Speer recalls how in these twilight days of the Thousand Year Reich, innumerable fantasies blossomed between Hitler and his close companions. Roosevelt’s death was hailed as a sign of providence, a turning point in the war that was compared with the way in which history had once given a last-minute victory to a hopelessly beaten Frederick the Great. Another example was the delusion that a new ‘death ray’ was about to be invented, a weapon that would change the outcome of the war. All this occurred one month before the final assault on Berlin, a time when Germany was in a complete shambles.

A particularly striking part of Speer’s reminiscences is his description of the delusional interplay of fantasies among Hitler and his inner circle—to whom the reality of the approaching end was totally unacceptable. While most fantasies originated with Hitler, his close entourage not only participated but also enhanced these irrational thoughts. In this small, increasingly isolated community the belief persisted that everything was not lost. Miraculous developments were just around the corner. Setbacks were only temporary. The deteriorating situation was the result of betrayal and sabotage. This delusional spell over the inner circle was broken only by advancing Russian troops, after which communal suicide and imprisonment followed.

In Speer’s recollections, one can identify the transferring of delusional ideas and unusual behavior patterns from one person to others in close association with the person primarily affected. These partners not only participated in the delusional ideas, but frequently developed them even further—a major characteristic of folie à deux.

I will now consider the origins of this idea within psychodynamic theory.

PSYCHODYNAMIC ASPECTS

The term folie à deux was first coined i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Editor Notes
• Title page
• Copyright page
• DEDICATION
• INTRODUCTION
• ABOUT THIS BOOK
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART 1: INTERPERSONAL AND GROUP PROCESSES
• PART 2: THE PEOPLE DIMENSION IN ORGANIZATIONS
• PART 3: CHANGING PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS
• CONCLUSION: CREATING AUTHENTIZOTIC ORGANIZATIONS
• REFERENCES
• Index