Working Below the Surface

The Emotional Life of Contemporary Organizations

Clare Huffington, William Halton, David Armstrong, Jane Pooley, Clare Huffington, William Halton, David Armstrong, Jane Pooley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367329884
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429924231
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

The chapters contributed to this book have been written by the staff and associates of The Tavistock Consultancy Service, whose distinctive competence is in the human dimension of enterprise and the dynamics of the workplace. The intention is to identify and explore some of the key themes that have emerged, such as the emotional world of the organisation and the dynamics of resistance to change, and how these affect and influence the understanding of leadership and management in contemporary organizations. No attempt is made to reach a consensus, but rather to raise and map out a territory of continuing question and debate. Contributors:David Armstrong; Andrew Cooper; Tim Dartington; William Halton; Sharon Horowitz; Linda Hoyle; Clare Huffington; Kim James; Sarah Miller; Anton Obholzer; Jane Pooley; and Nick Temple. Part of the Tavistock Clinic Series.

Chapter One
Emotions in organizations: disturbance or intelligence?

David Armstrong

This chapter offers a provisional account of the significance of emotions, the flow of feeling in thought and action, within organizational settings. This account seeks to build on but also in some respects to reframe earlier work within the "Tavistock tradition". It views emotions as a function of the organization-in-context, rather than simply of the individual and his or her relationships, or of the group. Correspondingly, it is suggested, alertness to the emotional undertow of organizational life can be a powerful source of information for managers and leaders in enlarging understanding, reviewing performance, foreseeing challenges and opportunities, and guiding decision and action.

Stating the obvious

Every organization is an emotional place. It is an emotional place because it is a human invention, serving human purposes and dependent on human beings to function. And human beings are emotional animals; subject to anger, fear, surprise, disgust, happiness, or joy, ease, and unease.

By the same token, organizations are interpersonal places and so necessarily arouse those more complex emotional constellations that shadow all interpersonal relations; love and hate, envy and gratitude, shame and guilt, contempt and pride.

Third, the interpersonal world of the organization is simultaneously a group world and subject to those tensions and conflicts that appear intrinsic to group life; between the wish to belong and the need to differentiate or between fear of the group and fear for the group.¹

These are all, one might say, propositional truisms, in that they state something obvious that one hardly needs to be a psychologist or a psychoanalyst to recognize and acknowledge. Emotions are constitutive of organizational life because they are constitutive of all human experience. (Recently, neuro-scientists have suggested that they may indeed be constitutive of consciousness itself (Damasio, 2000).)

What these disciplines, arid particularly psychoanalysis, add is a many-layered account of the ways in which emotions shape our experience, both consciously and unconsciously; their origin in early object relations, their expression in phantasy, and their pervasiveness and distribution within and across our private and public lives.

Questioning the obvious

It is one thing to acknowledge in this way that emotions are "constitutive of organizational life"; quite another to suggest that they may have something to tell us about a particular organization per se; for example, about the nature of its task or the way it is structured or the particular dilemmas and challenges it is facing. Emotions might be seen as independent variables affecting and influencing what happens in an organization but not otherwise intrinsic to it; an artefact, as it were, of the organization's dependence on human resources. It might, then, still be the case that an awareness of the emotional underpinning of behaviour, in oneself and in others, was a useful adjunct to management and leadership, enabling decision and action to be fine-tuned to the human realities of organizational life. This is the approach that informs the current vogue for "emotional intelligence"; "the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and our relationships" (Goleman, 1998).

Similarly, much of the writing arid practice of psychoanalytically orientated research and consultancy in the organizational field focuses primarily on disturbances to organizational functioning that arise out of individual or group dynamics, without further considering what, if anything, such "disturbance" may signify about the organizational field as a whole.

In what follows, by contrast, it is argued that emotional experience in organizations, at the level of both the individual and the group, should be viewed as a dependent rather than an independent variable. This could be put another way, that one cannot fully understand the place of emotions in organizations without reference to the boundary conditions that define any particular organization as a human construct. Making this shift of focus, it is proposed, significantly affects not so much how we understand the conscious and unconscious processes underlying emotional life in organizations, as their meaning; what they have to say about the organization as a system in context. One might express this as a move from emotional intelligence to the intelligence (as in "military intelligence") afforded by emotion. In turn, this move can open up new perspectives on the practice of organizations and their developmental needs.

An illustration

Before considering this position further the following material from a recent consultancy assignment offers a partial illustration.

This involves consulting to a client who heads a team of IT staff working with a group of traders in a large multi-national investment bank. The consultation is part of a wider brief negotiated by a colleague with the boss of the IT division of which my client and his staff are a part. There is a close working relationship between the boss and my colleague and it is partly as a result of this that my client has sought out consultation. Both his boss and he himself believe that he will benefit from the opportunity to think through his role and how he works within it. There is also an implication that he needs to hone his management and leadership skills as a prelude to possible promotion. He is aware of a number of apparent inhibitions in his approach to and exercise of those skills.

We start working together, ostensibly on a 2-3 week basis, meeting for two hours. I experience this work together as a tantalizing combination of hopeful feelings on my part—my client is young, bright, attractive, with a lot of technical flair—and frustration, amounting at times to exasperation. Sessions are cancelled or postponed at the last moment, sometimes without notice. Although my client will readily and apparently sincerely acknowledge much of what I try to put words to, it seems to make little or no difference to what he does and the tangles he gets into. I begin to feel we are going round in circles.

One recurring theme has to do with his relation to his boss, who is a powerful and dynamic figure with a highly successful track record. My client knew him from a previous company he had worked in and where he had built his reputation. The two of them had been quite close, socially as well as professionally, and it was through this prior relationship that my client had come into his present firm (just as it was through his relationship with his boss that he had come into this consultancy). In a series of four enigmatic pictures that, early in the consultancy, my client had drawn to represent how he experienced and felt about himself in his organization, his boss was the only represented figure he had been able to give a name to, placed on top of a kind of gantry, looking ahead.

The relationship between the two of them has remained close. They are often on the mobile phone to each other (including during consultancy sessions) and regularly meet when they happen to be in the same place at the same time (they are based in different countries).

Although their formal relation is that of subordinate and boss, the accounting relationship between them does not fit neatly into the conventional pattern of an organization chart. Indeed, one of the many apparently puzzling features of this organizational system as a whole, which my colleague and myself have been aware of from early on, is the difficulty of being able to gain any clear picture of the accountability relationships in play. The IT Division serves traders in different parts of the world and trading in a variety of equities. My client is responsible for serving traders dealing in a particular type of equity in a particular country office, but with an additional and developmental global brief. At the time we began working together there was no appointed head of IT in this office, though this was on the cards and my client was potentially a candidate for it. Also, since traders can be fiercely attached to their own local view of their information needs, and since this attachment is likely to influence the ways in which local IT staff work with traders, any attempt to introduce a more global information system is likely to be an exercise in persuasion and certainly not dictat. In short, accountability relations within the division are fluid, and there is no formal, "special" relationship between my client and his boss that would distinguish him from a good many of his peers.

None the less, there is a "special relationship" between them. It gradually becomes clearer that this relationship has a peculiar quality. On the one hand it is expressed in a close, intimate, and probably collusive form, in which my client takes the role of confidante, backstop, gossip, bouncer-off of ideas or of judgments—about the business, about the people, about the politics. This relationship is shot through with positive feelings of affection, regard, loyalty, and admiration. Less consciously there is an undertow of envy, which tends to be projected in the guise of disparagement of other senior personnel in the bank, amounting at times to contempt.

On the other hand, the relationship can take a masochistic turn, in which my client is continually letting his boss, other senior staff, and himself down, through neglecting aspects of his immediate operational role or not taking up tasks he has been invited to do; for example, organizing "off sites." It is as if letting people down in this way is unconsciously and paradoxically a means of testing or proving their commitment or attachment to him.

This relationship is replicated in the (transferential) relations between client and consultant, in that I continually have the experience of being pulled into a kind of rescue mentality, i.e., being mobilized to do something that will save him from the consequences of his actions and in so doing demonstrate, as it were, that I genuinely consider him worth saving.

Things came to a head as a result of two events, I have mentioned that there was no appointed head of the IT office in which my client worked and that he was himself a potential candidate for this post—an expectation that he believed his boss had encouraged. Quite suddenly an appointment to this position was made from outside the firm. At first my client appeared curiously unaffected (without affect), neither particularly disappointed nor particularly angry. His relationship with his boss continued much as before, but with one significant twist—that he seemed now to transfer something of his "behind the scenes" role to his relationship with the new arrival: showing him the ropes, briefing him about the people and the politics, helping out with recruitment of new staff, etc., while simultaneously, if gently, complaining at the cost to other aspects of his work. (None the less, this relationship had a new emotional quality to it, in that the element of disparagement was much closer to the surface.)

The second event was the completion of a 360° feedback exercise for my client, which he had himself requested, once more perhaps following the example of his boss, who had recently done the same and had found it productive. The results from this exercise underlined the extent to which my client was at risk of compromising his good standing, personally and professionally, with his team, his clients (the traders), and senior management by what were seen as puzzling and frustrating inconsistencies in performance, especially in the more management and leadership components of his role.

Again, my client's initial response seemed emotionally flat. He was grateful for what people had said, pleased by the undertow of personal regard in which he was held and not apparently taken aback by the criticism. This, he felt confirmed his own view of his "weaknesses" and indeed it was in fact the case that his own self appraisals were often sharper than those of others.

I wondered if this would turn out to be just another circle we would go round. However, it did not prove to be so. I had decided, with the encouragement of my colleague, to propose a more active form of engagement in which we would meet more regularly, at my client's place of work, if possible weekly and at the end of the working day. Almost immediately I was struck by how much more focused he had become, both in how he presented himself and in the material he offered for work. For the first time he was able to acknowledge something of his anger and disappointment both at himself and towards his boss, but without sourness. At the same time he began to give up the "behind the scenes" role and rediscover and build on his real skills in offering technical leadership, both directly and indirectly. There continued to be setbacks, but it seemed easier now for him to pull back from both the internal and external pressures to "help out" or "make good", with their accompanying manic edge.

It occurred to me that what the 360° appraisal had done was not so much to tell him something that he didn't know about himself, but coming on the heels of his failure to be appointed as head of the office, as enabling him to own what he knew. To own what he knew in turn implied relinquishing something else, which had shadowed his selfknowledge in a way that robbed it of its emotional meaning—the illusion of the "special relationship".

It would be possible, I think, to read this whole episode from a clinical perspective, in terms of the enactment of oedipal phantasies, projected on to the relationship between my client and his boss (simultaneously my client and myself) and within a construction of the organization as a kind of extended family. And certainly there were occasions in working with my client when I wondered whether he might have benefited more from individual therapy, which at one point he was ready to consider. Although he rarely touched on personal areas of his life and history, I was aware of aspects of both that could have been seen to be part of a piece with his organizational experience.

However, and quite apart from considerations of my own competence and the boundaries of our role relationship (I was not working with him as a therapist), to have taken this route, either then or now, would have missed the opportunity afforded by a different and more organizational vertex.

In introducing the theme of my client's relation to his boss, I referred to the fluidity of accountability relations generally within the IT division and indeed within the bank as a whole. It was as if the whole organization and its various parts ran on the basis of informal relationships; networks of influence and persuasion that cut across and often seemed to subvert what an outsider would consider to be formal accountability lines. As my colleague put it, "there is often an apparent blurring of boundaries and difficulty in staying within the tasks and boundaries of the formal role".

From this perspective, one might consider the more pathological element in my client's relation with his boss as elicited by this structural "weakness" or "flaw", within which an internal patterning of object relations could take root and flourish. This would correspond with the position taken by Elliott Jaques, among others, in a well known critique of the relevance of psychoanalytic formulations to organizational functioning: that in so far as they are relevant at all, they are relevant only as a signal of the absence of "requisite organizational structure" (Jaques, 1995).

But this begs the question of what is "requisite structure" or, alternatively, of why an apparently "irrequisite structure" has evolved. In fact, both my colleague and myself found ourselves struggling for a considerable time with this issue. Were we at risk of seeking an explanation for what seemed to be evidence of individual pathology in normative assumptions about the appropriate structuring of accountability relationships?

The answer we gradually came to was affirmative—yes, we were. And in the process of arriving at this answer new light was thrown on my client's construction of the "special relationship". To summarize, and at the cost of some simplification, our hypothesis went as follows. The fluidity of accountability relations and the substitution of networks of influence and persuasion for formal lines of authority was an expression of at least two organizational realities. One corresponded to the developmental situation of the bank as a whole, which was expanding into new areas of business, buying up or buying in new bodies of expertise, often from diverse business and trading cultures. In this context there was some sense in keeping boundaries fluid and allowing a certain latitude in how things operated, even at the cost of a good deal of both organizational and psychological mess.

The second and more immediately relevant reality concerned the relation between the IT Division in question and its particular users—the business units and their traders. From a structural point of view the business units are dependent on IT to operate. Furthermore, and increasingly, IT applications can significantly add to the knowledge base of the business, both regionally and globally. In some respects IT could be seen as a leader in promoting and developing global operations, against the resistance of traders who, as mentioned earlier, can tend to focus rather on what they see as their more immediate local needs. On the other hand, it is the traders who have traditionally called the shots as the producers of revenue. For them IT is simply a service, and a very expensive one at that. In this structural and cultural context, there is a premium on building and cultivating special relations, through whatever means, as vehicles and levers of influence. At the same time, the pay-off from success in so doing can fall well short of felt considerations of equity. To use a very suggestive image offered by my client's boss in another context, the senior traders are seen as the "sun kings" who get all the glory, in a way which can "brew rebellion underneath", feelings of being demeaned and undervalued.

One might say that this is a system that both puts a premium on special relations and simultaneously exacts a certain psychological cost; the inevitability of having to contend with feelings of envy and shame, which cannot be contained within a well-bounded organizational structure. But none of this is necessarily an indicator of unfunctionality. It may rather be an expression of something that is part and parcel of what might ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• FOREWORD
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Emotions in organizations: disturbance or intelligence?
• Endword
• APPENDIX I: Notes on consultancy approach and techniques
• APPENDIX II: Glossary
• REFERENCES
• INDEX