The Social Psychology of Organizations

Diagnosing Toxicity and Intervening in the Workplace

Joanna Wilde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317585398
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Healthy and successful organizations require the people who work within them to be happy, resilient and creative. Just as a human body is undermined if it suffers from sickness, so an organization can only function fully if the people who work within it feel engagement and well-being, and any toxic influences which shape or burden their working lives are resolved

This important new title provides a much-needed overview not only of what it means for an organization to be weakened by pervasive psychological influences within the working environment, but also how this dysfunction can be addressed through psychological interventions. The book is split into three core sections:

• Toxicity and Dysfunction in the workplace, outlining structural, behavioural, emotional and cognitive sources of toxicity that undermine organizations
• Principles of the healthy workplace, outlining core concepts of belonging, contribution and meaning from which organizations in turn benefit
• Creating the healthy workplace, outlining a range of approaches to addressing organizational toxicity, including design thinking, positive psychology, and evidence-based approaches.

Written by a practicing organizational psychologist, and including case studies to illustrate how toxicity at the micro level can impact upon wider organizational goals, the book draws on a wide range of literature to provide an accessible, focussed understanding of how the individual psychological experiences of working people can have wider consequences for an organization, and how interventions within that process can address these issues. It is ideal reading for students and researchers of occupational or organizational psychology, organizational behaviour, business and management and HRM.

PART I

Doing intelligent activism

The new social psychology of
organizations

The purpose of the chapters that form Part I of this text is to address the important know-how or practice to enable organizational detox. The book has started with the know-how as this then feeds ethical and practical understanding into the later explorations of what we know (Part II) and what we are learning from practice (Part III).

Chapter 1 outlines the model for understanding the translation and mobilization of knowledge for practice. Central to this is the use of the literature from the Social Studies of Science Knowledge (SSK) and Actor Network Theory (ANT) outlining what it can teach managers, consultants and organizational psychologists about the phases of knowledge translation for impact.

Chapter 2 gives an overview of the experience of the initial client engagement, focused on addressing the vulnerabilities of asking for help. This covers the variation in topic presentation, the stages in client problem/solution formulation and the different engagement structures that can be set up.

Chapter 3 critiques the conventions of the consulting cycle, covering ideas of intervention and organizational change and outlines the failures of the current orthodoxy around organizational change management and outlining the developing change platform ideas informed by social movement theories.

Chapter 4 explores the types of methodology available to the intelligent activist. It critiques the emerging orthodoxy of decision/cognition ideas about ‘evidence-based’ practice and outlines four other methodologies that offer more diversity in the way we can approach intervention. All outlined methodologies use evidence but work within very different phases of knowledge translation.

Chapter 5 outlines key ethical capabilities for practice and outlines four ethical considerations for the ‘intelligent activist’: helping and harm; authority and knowledge; confidentiality and contracting in complex systems; and self-regulation and supervision.

1

KNOWLEDGE TRANSLATION FOR COMPLEX WORKPLACES

Introduction

I would suggest that the purpose of investing in the development of psychology, industrial relations, management studies and other social science knowledge is not merely to know but more importantly to help (Schein 2009). I conceptualize this practice orientation as ‘intelligent activism’, which covers a distinct set of action-focused capabilities (outlined later in Table 1.2). This shift from knowledge production to knowledge deployment being centre stage could also be characterized as the move from the ‘scientist’ (root: to know) to the ‘engineer’ (root: to contrive or devise), designer (root: to mark out) or practitioner (root: to do).

The important issues in this arena are those of tool, action and ethics (Spier 2001) with two distinct and serious sets of ethical questions that need to be faced in day-to-day practice:

• The first set centres on how we ‘translate’ knowledge into tools, action and practice to help.

• The second set centres on ethical decisions about who to help, whether help for one causes harm to another and what to do about these tensions.

Psychosocial practice, whether by consultants, managers or peers is being made increasingly invisible. Every collaborative endeavour relies on ‘invisible work’ but the lack of recognition and support for such work is becoming increasingly damaging to organizations. Its removal, most often due to quasi-rational cost-cutting, is a significant source of toxicity (see Chapter 7 on structural sources of toxicity). ‘Intelligent activism’ is one of these areas of ‘invisible work’ and we need to have a much clearer, confident and rigorous language to afford this work its proper place.

The impact of this invisibility can be seen in the emerging arguments that ‘science-based’ methods can be, without problem, transported into client field sites. From my perspective, the different ethics (see Chapter 5) between lab and field is the biggest challenge for the concept of the ‘scientist-practitioner’ (Hays-Thomas 2006; Muchinsky 2006) currently being advocated and we need a much more robust understanding of practice as distinct from rather than subservient to science. To address this I have used ‘lab’ generated evidence that explores how knowledge is developed and applied. This knowledge comes from the Social Studies of Knowledge (SSK) and Actor Network Theory (ANT), which provide the insights that help describe and elaborate the phases of knowledge translation for deployment in the ‘field’.

Translating knowledge for effective intervention

This body of knowledge uses various concepts that I have found extremely useful in my 30 years of professional practice and illustrative references are given in the further reading section at the end of this chapter:

• The field (Latour 1988) is an abstraction used to describe the day-to-day emergent context we, as practitioners, work within. In the work of professional practice we would describe this as the client context. The critical concept here is that the field is usually focused on addressing a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel and Weber 1973). A wicked problem is a complex problem that is changing and cannot be completely ‘solved’. It has multiple variables, many of them that are contextual, that mutate through time. A wicked problem is in sharp contrast to a bounded problem required in scientific work.

• The laboratory or ‘lab’ (Latour and Woolgar 1986) is an abstraction used to describe the controlled social scientific space where ‘field’ ideas get refined and changed through a set of disciplines using contextually defined knowledge rules. The output from this is ‘socially’ agreed ‘facts’. In our work we would describe this as academia or science.

• Translation (Callon 1986) is a concept used to describe the process of knowledge changing its character between field and laboratory. It refers to the ongoing movement of know-what and know-how between these two environments and is also focused on ‘wicked problems’. In our work we would describe this as practice.

• Mobilization (Callon 1986) is a concept used to describe the way in which a wide range of networks and interests get activated to enable translated knowledge to have a wider social impact. In our work we would describe this as policy and practice influence.

To date we have tended to have a fairly polarized view in the psychological and managerial professions of what counts as legitimate knowledge:

• In organizational psychology, there is the tendency to privilege the ‘lab’, this has been articulated in the concept of the scientist-practitioner role designed to subsume practice as a servant of science. This is supported with assertions of the need to use ‘evidence-based’ approaches and the rejection of other approaches characterized as ‘fads and fashions’.

• In managerial work, which tends to privilege the field, I have encountered the polarization between acceptance of ‘common sense’ approaches, and the rejection of ‘the theoretical’. This encourages the uncritical imposition of normative approaches that are disconnected from our growing understanding of what human environments need to help us thrive and prosper.

These unhelpful acts of polarization work rhetorically to maintain the distance between ‘lab and field’: science and practice; client and academia. I consider that the tendency to polarize represents a failure to understand the critical importance of the ongoing work of ‘translation’ between these two distinct and yet equally as disciplined relationships with knowledge. Fundamentally these ignore the evidence of translation and mobilization as psychosocial processes in their own right. The skill to manage polarities without these problems has been recognized as a critical skill for working with complexity (Johnson 1992) and paradox (Handy 1995).

Working in translation for intelligent activism

In Chapter 3, I will briefly critique the current formulation of the consulting cycle used in training practitioners, which is an implicit attempt to import academic method into the field. It has not yet given sufficient consideration to the vicissitudes of practice, so is inherently misleading. I will also demonstrate how a translation-focused approach to intervention subtly alters how we need to describe and teach practice. Instead of it being taught as a ‘knowledge driven method’ it needs to be formulated and taught as a ‘helping-based practice’ that enables knowledge translation.

To understand translation, we need to recognize the differences between the knowledge practices used in the client context (field) and academy (lab). Good practice is not merely the transportation of ‘laboratory approaches’. However, good practice also does not ignore the value of importing and translating external evidence. Using the formulation of translation from the Social Studies of Knowledge, Science and Technology enables us to conceptualize:

• the difference between field and lab (client context and the academy) and what this implies for ethical practice, without succumbing to the temptation to subordinate one approach to the other;

• the process of knowledge translation – developing, refining, elaborating and deploying our knowledge in support of intelligent activism;

• the capabilities required for effective translation.

The difference between client context (field) and academia (lab)

The work of helping through system intervention, using the ideas of translation, is an attempt to work productively with this polarity. I have considerable concern with the way the scientist-practitioner idea appears to uncritically assume that ‘lab’-based methods and facts can be ‘plonked’ into the ‘field’ and have positive impact. This chapter presents a very different model of knowledge translation to address this problem. The central issue for me is about helping, which combines an acceptance of wicked problems and the ethic of client-centricity. The idea of client-centricity in this text builds on the notion of process consultation (Schein 1998, 2009) but differs in one significant way. Schein (1998) builds client-centricity into his formulation by explicitly displacing the active use of expertise and knowledge to support organizational intervention. Schein’s (1998) typology of consulting work is outlined later in this chapter. Given our investment in knowledge development and the important insights generated, I do not consider it acceptable to displace the knowledge and expertise that we have invested so heavily ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Social Psychology of Organizations
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Doing Intelligent Activism: The New Social Psychology of Organizations
• PART II: Building an Integrated Model of Organizational Toxicity
• PART III: Learning from Practice to Intervene in Toxic Organizations
• Conclusion
• Index