The Dysfunctional Workplace

Theory, Stories, and Practice

Seth Allcorn, Howard F. Stein

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780826220653
• eBook ISBN: 9780826273529
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This book explores an aspect of organizational life that is at times difficult to acknowledge and often painful to recall. Stories invite reflection and the development of greater understanding of organizational dynamics. This fresh scholarship provides a theoretical framework for discussion. Throughout this book, Allcorn and Stein utilize a psychoanalytically informed perspective to help readers understand why a leader, colleague or friend behaves in ways that are destructive of others and the organization and provides a basis for organizations to survive and thrive in a dysfunctional workplace.

PART ONE

THEORY

The first chapter in part 1 sets the context of the book by underscoring the role of storytelling throughout human history. Stories are in a sense statements about who we are. They provide rich and varied insights into ourselves, others, and the world around us, including the workplace. Chapter 2 provides an overview of different perspectives and approaches to understanding workplace stories. It examines the various ways stories in the workplace and elsewhere may be understood and used, in some instances for the explicit purpose of managing organizations. In Chapter 3 we introduce definitions and discuss a select number of concepts drawn from psychoanalytic theory that we will use to understand the stories. Further, our first story uses the definitions of the concepts in terms of how they may be used to understand life at work. The concepts can be readily understood and appreciated for their contribution to understanding one’s self, others, and groups in the workplace.

CHAPTER 1

Stories from the Workplace
An Introduction

Life in many ways is about stories. We tell stories to convey what life is about. The answers to the questions “What did you do today?” and “What was life like for you today?” are stories about daily adventures, happenings and events, and conversations with others. These stories might be said to be a discontinuous narrative. The books, newspapers, and magazines we read; the televised content we watch; and much of the Internet content we are exposed to all tell us stories. What we hear about others are stories. Stories are those widely used forms of language in which we articulate our experiences and the meanings life has for us. Stories are, then, a way of knowing and sharing with others what we know and a way for others to share with us what they know.

In this book we suggest that the workplace contains a vast array of stories—life stories, work stories, interpersonal and group stories, leaders’ stories, and our stories about the organization and its leaders. This book explores these stories for understanding and meaning. The stories we are about to tell explore two fundamental questions: How did things go at work today? What is it like to work here? The answers to these questions point to an underappreciated complexity in workplace experience and also to the darker side of our lives at work.

The workplace stories we tell say a lot about human nature, stress and strains, and coping with anxiety, all of which may evoke psychologically defensive responses in order to cope with distressing workplace experience. In particular, in organizations much of human nature is expressed through what leaders and followers do in their relationships with one another. This doing may be wonderful and humane or devolve into abusive, manipulative, and sadistic behavior that is harmful to everyone in the workplace, sabotaging the organization’s ability to perform well enough to adapt and survive in the marketplace.

By focusing on the dark side of human nature, this book is about toxic workplaces, as seen and heard through the medium of stories and storytelling. It is also a book about storytelling as an approach to knowing and healing organizations and people. We will argue that storytelling is a crucial component of studying and working with organizations, a vital qualitative method to help understand and explain organizational life, and a way to facilitate humane change. Storytelling helps to affirm the humanity of people in workplaces and helps people and groups to heal. Further, storytelling offers access to the breadth and depth of workplace experience, what Michael Diamond (1993) calls the unconscious life of organizations, a world ruled more by the irrational dark side of human nature than by rationality and enlightened self-interest.

Why Organizational Stories and Storytelling?

Using stories from the workplace raises important questions. Why should stories count as organizational data? Why has an interest in stories and storytelling burgeoned since the early 1990s? What do stories offer organizational research and consulting that traditional quantitative data do not? Yiannis Gabriel, an international authority on stories and storytelling, writes that “stories are pithy narratives with plots, characters and twists that can be full of meaning. Successful stories have beginnings, middles and ends” (Gabriel, 2011).

The core of stories is meaning and experience. Stories matter because they help us make sense of our experiences. They enable us to learn from the experiences of other people. Stories express our emotions and can trigger change or become stumbling blocks to change. Stories are vital ways in which we construct our individual and group identities and sustain our bonds to our communities and places of work (Gabriel, 2011).

Since the 1990s stories and storytelling have blossomed in social science research. People hunger for stories. Stories offer affective (emotional), expressive, and symbolic dimensions of life and are not limited to the instrumental or practical. Gabriel writes that “research on organizational storytelling accelerated considerably since the 1990’s when stories started to make regular appearances as ‘data’ for organizational analysis” (Gabriel, 2011). Data collection now often includes stories. For example, Stein wrote two early books based largely on clinical stories and stories from health-care organizations: Clinical Stories and Their Translations (with Maurice Apprey, 1990) and Listening Deeply (1994). Both Stein and Allcorn, together with Howell Baum and Michael Diamond, wrote The Human Cost of a Management Failure: Downsizing at General Hospital (1996), which tells the story of what happened at this hospital through the voices of more than twenty hospital executives whom we interviewed three times in one year.

Gabriel addresses the timing or context of renewed interest in stories:

Why do stories influence hearts and minds in a way that the cold power of logic, science and facts fail to do? It seems to me that the ready availability of information and data, far from undermining the power of storytelling, has reinforced it. In a world where many of us are choking in information and data, facts, figures and PowerPoint slides, stories cut through and communicate meaning with remarkable speed and economy. If we have a professional problem or a management problem we will often turn to a person who has experienced and managed to overcome a similar problem, seeking to learn from their experience. (Gabriel, 2011)

In the stories that follow, we will suggest that just as dreams are a way to understand the individual unconscious, stories—like folklore and myth in preliterate society—are a way to understand the unconscious as well as well as the conscious dimensions of experience and meaning in organizational life. In fact the stories of our lives at work are a route to knowing the workplace and our experience of it. Further, stories and storytelling are an approach to both knowing and healing organizations and people. Stories are, then, a way of knowing organizational life in greater depth, offering rich opportunities for meaningful change.

Some Other Perspectives on Storytelling

Before proceeding further, we would like to note alternate, nonpsychodynamic ways of thinking about stories and storytelling that are drawn from business and organizational perspectives and beyond. Stories and storytelling are used in many ways in organizations, and the history of doing so is long. Storytelling is one of the foundations of managing public relations and marketing, and it is often used in branding the company and its products and services. Becoming effective at crafting a narrative is the subject of much discussion on the Internet, where many helpful suggestions are provided to improve this important task. In telling our stories in this book, we are using them for a much different purpose. We tell the stories to encourage readers to explore and reflect upon the often dark side of the workplace and their own experiences.

Stories in the management literature are also helpful in leading and managing organizations (Smith, 2012). Stories in many forms, such as stories about organizational history, as well as stories about what recently happened, can help to promote understanding, integration, and mutual sharing of experience, as well as a shared sense of the organizational narrative and culture (Armstrong, 1992; James & Minnis, 2004). Organization members can in effect join a narrative as they come together to collectively create and then listen to it, pass it on to others, and experience it daily in their work. Leaders and managers effectively use stories to paint a picture and frame conversations about events, work, and problem solving—stories that often become the party line, or obligatory myth. Stories can be important in terms of promoting learning about basic concepts and principles that help organizational members become more effective and work more safely. For example, stories about injuries at work are sobering and cautionary, and people who have not heard them may be doomed to be injured themselves. Our stories also serve in part to promote understanding, as well as the critical thinking and reflectivity not always encouraged by management.

Stories can also inspire and motivate organization members to strive for higher performance standards, increased productivity, and greater efficiency. Workplaces always have stories about big bonuses for a successful year and layoffs during bad years. The charismatic CEO and senior leaders may also provide motivational stories that address vision and mission. Organizational meetings may include invited guests who tell inspirational stories about how a product or service might have saved a life or provided an exceptionally good experience. An example of this might be a mother telling a story to a gathering of trauma center managers and supervisors about how their work in one hospital saved her child’s life.

Stories have many intentional uses: to promote products, services, organizations, and leaders, perhaps with the aim of manipulating what others think and feel and do. That is the goal of marketing. Management can also purposefully use stories to convey to employees a sense of organizational culture, an overarching vision of the organization, and a sense of belonging to something important.

Of course not all stories in the workplace are created and managed by leaders. The grapevine, the rumor mill, and chats in the lunch room and at the water fountain exemplify this aspect of organizational life, where the stories may not be consistent with how management wants stories used and are beyond the reach of management to control. In these informal settings organizational events may be redefined and interpreted, in turn exposing a darker and more ominous side to what is taking place than the stories created by management. Once again we note that the stories we will tell in this book are not intended to serve these management purposes but rather to illuminate the dark side of organizational life that we then hold up for reflection, inspection, discussion, and analysis with psychodynamically informed perspectives (Hummel, 1991; Pollack & Bono, 2013).

Stories and storytelling are hardly limited to business and organizational environments. Stories and storytelling have been central to the human saga since the development of language. They pervade human history and culture. From American Indians to sub-Saharan Africans to Slavic and Latino Americans, hunter-gatherer bands, tribes, and ethnic groups have used storytelling for multiple purposes. Stories and storytelling are used (1) to convey group identity—who we are and how we came to be (origin myths); (2) to transmit history through myth and folklore; (3) to share knowledge about the world and how to make one’s way in it; (4) to offer moral lessons and guidance; and (5) to explain customs. Oral traditions long preceded, and everywhere now continue side by side with, written traditions.

People convey and construct their narrative history through stories. Storytelling is perhaps the essence of the mass media. From the Internet to movies storytelling is also entertainment. Museum collections and displays tell the stories the curators wish to tell in anticipation of what they think patrons wish to see. Social networking also provides for storytelling that is transnational and multicultural. Finally, Michael White and David Epton (1990) founded a school for, and devised a method of, narrative family therapy. They help people to externalize and reflect upon internal experience and then to craft new stories—precisely our method and goal in this book about organizational life. We turn now to the exploration through stories of unconscious processes in the workplace, which is the focus of this book.

A Reflection on Us (All)

In this book we explore persecutory, frightening, and just plain nasty organizational events through stories. People engage in a never-ending effort to make some sense of this side of life by telling stories about it. And these distressing experiences from the workplace often seem to be never ending, with one abuse followed by another.

At the same time it is only human to turn away from what is too horrible to hear and observe. This may in fact make it a challenge for the reader to absorb the stories in this book. The stories are, however, there—like it or not. Denial, rationalization, and turning away lead to the inability to learn from experience, and without learning and reflection there is no change. Life at work will not get better if it is not open to inspection.

Many stories in this book are based on our firsthand experiences, while we observed others, and still others were reported to us. We have modified them for reasons of confidentiality. At the same time the integrity of the stories remains intact. All the stories that we offer actually happened in organizations, and they happened to real people.

The majority of these stories happened to us, the authors, either as actors or observers or both, during our forty-five-year careers. There is, then, an autobiographical orientation in telling the stories. These stories, events, and happenings shaped our lives at work. In many instances they evoked disbelief and generated an enduring drive to try to understand and appreciate why the events in these stories happened to us or to those around us. It is also important to appreciate that we did not pass through all this workplace experience and terrain without its having significant effects on our personal and psychological well-being. No one can say events like these do not create fear, anxiety, suffering, and financial loss. Being personally attacked and bullied across months and years at work is ultimately a soul-stripping experience. We acknowledge this. We have experienced it. We are saying that it is okay to feel the hurt, fear, and anger. You are not alone in this experience.

The stories provided here offer an opportunity to take a time-out from workplace and organizational experience. They hold organizational events up for inspection. In particular this inspection process reveals that, while the stories and voices are all different, they are also much the same. They share much in terms of content and themes.

An important first step is acknowledging that the telling of the stories offers at least a partial way out of the swamp of personal distress and despair. When others read and listen and perhaps validate the stories and experience in this book—“Yes, this also happened to me”—they may gain a sense of being emotionally held and comforted for a moment (Goodman & Meyers, 2012). “I understand you.” Storytelling is, then, for us as authors and for you as readers, a contribution to restoring a sense of well-being, wholeness, and personal integrity. “I survived. And I learned in the process of surviving.” Hearing our stories and telling your stories is a way out of the swamp to a higher ground, where some sense of personal healing may occur.

Some Overarching Themes

The stories we relate in the chapters that follow can stand alone as interesting in and of themselves. They can also be embedded in larger overarching or underlying stories—for example, about the United States and even more broadly about human nature as it is expressed in organizational life. This perspective does not change the content of the stories. Rather it puts a large frame around the stories and thereby gives them broader and deeper meaning.

Theme One

Our first overarching theme is that “you couldn’t make this up,” something we said to each other and ourselves as reassurance that the stories actually happened. In its own way each story is emotionally counterintuitive. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how irrational the professional workplace is. Thus these stories are outside the boundary of ordinary stories or narratives of American culture. The workplace stories strike us as bizarre, absurd, even irrational. What rational organization, for instance, throws away millions of dollars in income to feed the narcissistic appetite of its leader?

Our widely shared American fantasy about rationality in economics, politics, and decision making has no space for stories such as these. “That’s impossible,” “it did not or could not have happened,” and “it violates common sense!” are common reactions and protests to stories like these. “People don’t destroy their own organizations! They maximize productivity, profit, shareholder value, and efficiency!” Right? Denial is a powerful psychological defense.

In our widely shared ideal cultural self-image, we like to think of ourselves as rational, objective, grounded in reality, kindly, compassionate, and driven economically toward greater efficiency, productivity, and profit. The stories offered in this book present an alternate view of organizational life, identity, function, and outcome. The stories mirror the dark side of ourselves in our myriad for-profit, public, and nonprofit organizations.

Part of our purpose in gathering and telling these stories is to turn the impossible into the possible, to make the unimaginable imaginable. The stories bring dark secrets and taboos into the daylight of thought and reflection. When we learned or experienced these stories, we had to overcome our own resistance to acknowledging that this really happened. For us the challenge was, and is, to move these stories from the realm of impossibility to possibility and with that to reality.

Idealized cultural models such as rational man, objectivity, and enlightened self-interest are often not reality. Ultimately to take these stories seriously is to alter our perception, definition, and experience of reality itself. It requires that we overcome our own resistance and believe the unbelievable. In turn it requires that we relinquish a cherished ideal image about what organizational reality is like. This letting go triggers a sense of disorientation and anxiety about a lost and comforting ideal. If we can allow ourselves to suspend belief in these models, perhaps the emotionally indigestible may become digestible. That is, we may be more able to acknowledge that this really happens at work.

Theme Two

A second overarching theme unites many of these stories: Stories do not exist as entities by themselves. Stories always emerge from a relationship between storyteller and listener. We, the authors, learned that we had a specific kind of relationship with the people who told some of these stories to us. We became witnesses. We did not simply collect data called workplace stories. What we were given was more like a gift of knowledge and insight offered in trust by those who told us their stories. In retelling these stories we are bearing witness: “Yes, this actually happened.”

Many people thanked us for listening. No one had been interested in their exp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One - Theory
• Part Two - Stories and Analysis
• Part Three - Conclusions
• References
• Index