Humanness in Organisations: A Psychodynamic Contribution (review)

Abstract

issn 0362-4021 © 2014 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 38, No. 3, Fall 2014 269 1 Correspondence should be addressed to William Rush, MD, 26 Court Street, #502, Brooklyn, NY 11201. E-mail: rushw01@gmail.com. Book Review Humanness in Organisations: A Psychodynamic Contribution. Edited by Leopold Vansina. London: Karnac Books, 2013, 250 pp. Reviewed by William Rush1 Humanness in Organisations: A Psychodynamic Contribution is a collection of essays and observations about the intrapsychic experience of work. Editor Leopold Vansina, a Belgian psychologist and career organizational consultant, presents his own essays and those of eight other contributors who are largely psychologists and organizational consultants from France, the Netherlands, and the United States. Humanness is both a lament on current trends in the workplace and a call for change. The intended audience includes consultants, social scientists, and, frankly, anyone with concern for our psyches. The targeted audience, however, is the management professionals and business leaders who are positioned to implement the authors’ ideas. The book’s central thesis is that, within organizations, technological, economic, and cultural trends are causing working people to feel alienated, both emotionally and psychically. They feel alone, unhappy, and disconnected; suspicious of management ’s intentions; and less motivated to contribute to their communities. Humanness addresses the many reasons why. These include developments in business, such as globalization, the rise of the digital economy, and the decentralization of workforces; trends in academia, such as a preference for easily quantifiable metrics and quick results over the study of complex systems; and trends in society, such as the deification of performance, the attribution of responsibility to individuals over systems, and an intolerance for ambiguity. Vansina and his colleagues argue that these trends have profound psychological implications. They also have economic implications. Without the flexibility and creativity of a more psychologically secure workforce, organizations (companies, schools, hospitals, clubs, etc.) will be more likely to stagnate or fail. 270 rush The first half of the book develops these ideas, whereas the latter half proposes specific ideas for organizational leadership. In a fascinating critique titled “Feedback or Reviewing” (chapter 8), Vansina skewers the growing trend of the “360-degree feedback,” a performance evaluation comprising input from peers, supervisors, and subordinates. Relying on social pressure to conform to group norms, and often delivered by an anonymous HR consultant, 360-degree feedback is, he argues, emblematic of leadership’s avoidance of real human encounters. The analyst Kenneth Eisold, in his essay “Conversations on Work” (chapter 9), describes working with three clients to clarify their relationships to their professions. In “Notes Towards a Model of Organizational Therapy” (chapter 5), Edgar Schein offers the contrasting perspective of doing therapy for an organization, where the client is the company. In “Facilitating Transitional Change” (chapter 7), Vansina and Sandra Schruijer share their experiences conducting organizational therapy—in one interesting case, they fostered a dynamic process by guiding participants (colleagues from a small company) through the construction of a miniature village. It turns out that the conditions necessary for organizational change overlap with those of good psychotherapy . These include commitment from management, setting aside time and space for the process, sharing personal experiences, and accepting the ambiguity of the process or outcome. The essays vary widely in their style. Several chapters are dense and require effort. Dominique Lhuilier’s “Work, Management, and Psychic Health” (chapter 2) is one such essay. She describes the intrapsychic experience of modern work in sentences such as “psychologism draws upon a contemporary rationality, which compels the subject to explain what happens to him under the auspices of subjective appropriation : to understand the causality of experiences and their facilitators is to explore one’s inner self” (p. 41). I think I understand, although I’m not sure. Other essays, like those of Schein and Eisold, are more direct and accessible. My favorites were essays in which the authors provided some historical background , synthesized their viewpoints of current trends, and proposed practices for adapting to the changing world. Gilles Amado’s “Psychic Imprisonment and Its Release Within Organizations and Working Relationships” (chapter 1), Schruijer’s “Are We Losing the Group in the Study of Group Dynamics? Three Illustrations” (chapter 4), and James Krantz’s “Approaching Twenty...