Abstract
Orientation: During times of organisational change and restructuring, employees are often placed in acting capacities. The unconscious experiences and systemic impact thereof have not been researched in South Africa or globally. Research purpose: The research aim was to report on the systems psychodynamic lived experiences of professional employees functioning in acting capacities for an extended period of time. Motivation for the study: Consciously, the appointment of acting staff serves the restructuring agenda by testing change endeavours. Unconsciously, they may become representatives of change and containers of systemic anxiety. Research design, approach and method: A qualitative and descriptive research approach was undertaken using five participants as collective case study. Data were gathered through interviews and hermeneutically analysed. Main findings: The manifesting themes were conflict, anxiety, task, role, boundary, authorisation and identity. Further interrogation of the data revealed the interrelated aspects of becoming containers of systemic toxicity, employment and psychological contracts being violated, being placed on hold, seduced, bullied and traumatised. Practical/managerial implications: A dysfunctional organisation experiencing anxiety about restructuring, manifesting as incompetence, emotion turmoil and systemic toxicity, (unconsciously) projected its anxiety into professionals in acting capacities, who became the containers of the toxicity. The symptoms (anxiety) as well as the cause (restructuring) need to be studied and addressed. Contribution/value add: This research illustrated how professionals in acting capacities were unconsciously used to perform the emotional labour related to change and became the unconscious containers of larger systemic dynamics, specifically about the anxiety of change and restructuring.
Highlights
Organisational change endeavours (Cummings, Worley, & Donovan, 2020; Viljoen, 2015) are operationalised as structured processes towards the optimisation of the organisation as a whole
The seven themes illustrated that on the individual systemic level, the findings revealed the acting professionals’ identities to contain experiences of personal and social conflict; high levels of neurotic anxiety followed by an array of defences for self-preservation; a stuckness, hopelessness and helplessness in the execution of their primary task; anxiety in managing their space, time and role boundaries and de-authorisation, all adding to an experience of their employee and professional identities being under attack
A container for the discomfort was found in a subsystem of professionals on senior general manager level responsible for strategy implementation
Summary
Organisational change endeavours (Cummings, Worley, & Donovan, 2020; Viljoen, 2015) are operationalised as structured processes towards the optimisation of the organisation as a whole. Studies on redundancy (Sher, 2013, 2017) and bullying (White, 2013) reported these two organisational phenomena to be attacks on both employment and the psychological contract. Impacted employees manifest with symptoms of extremely high levels of survival and performance anxiety, an array of defence mechanisms, a struggle with adjusting their psychological contract, as well as negative climate implications for the organisation as a macro system (Armstrong & Rustin, 2015; Sher, 2017). Related to the above-mentioned organisational practices is the appointment of employees in acting capacities. Apart from comments in newspapers (Basson, 2013; Ross & Gerstenzang, 1989), only one research article could be traced that quantitatively studied the conscious impact of organisational acting (Emewu, 2013). The results show that employees are often kept in acting capacities for extended periods of time, without official http://www.sajip.co.za
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