Author note: Larry Hirschhorn is Principal of the Center for Applied Research, Inc., a faculty member at the William Alanson White Institute's Program on Organizational Development and Consultation, and the author of several books, including The Workplace Within. Carole K. Barnett is a Ph.D. candidate in the Organizational Psychology Program at the University of Michigan and co-editor of Globalizing Management: Creating and Leading the Competitive Organization.

This authoritative source book on the learning and creative application of the systems psychodynamic perspective defines the field, presenting the key concepts, models, and social methodologies that derive from it, together with their theoretical and conceptual underpinnings in psychoanalysis, group relations and open systems theory.

On the surface, people go to work and come home again. They sometimes manage people while most are managed themselves. But beneath the function and structures of the work itself, a whole range of emotions affects the success of the relationship between employee and manager and ultimately the organisation they both belong to. Psychodynamic Organisational Theory: Key Concepts and Cases provides a comprehensive but accessible introduction to this fascinating field of study. Featuring case vignettes which bring the various concepts to life, the book is divided into four parts. Part I looks at how the individual relates to the organisation and the unconscious energies they bring, while Part II examines group dynamics and how they affect productivity, including a chapter on meetings. Part III explores the realm of leadership and what roles a manager can play in managing their staff, while Part IV introduces the idea of personality and describes how the manager’s personality influences management dynamics as well as the wider organisational culture. Central to the book, as well as the idea that organisational phenomena are often unconscious, is the understanding that relationships are always reciprocal. Through complex psychological dynamics manager and employee influence and change each other during the process of managing and being managed. This text will be essential reading for students and scholars of leadership, HRM, and organizational psychology, as well as consultants and managers looking for practical insights into how human relationships affect the success of every organisation.

This book explores organizations as not simply rational, technological structures and networks for organizing people around tasks and services; it defines organizations as relational, experiential, and perceptual systems.

In this revealing study, Larry Hirschhorn examines the rituals, or social defenses, organizations develop to cope with change. Using extended ease studies from offices, factories, and social services, he describes why these often irrational practices that fragment and injure individuals within the workplace exist, how they operate, and how they can be reshaped to enhance people's work experience.

Understanding experience at work, especially in toxic organizations, is a multidimensional undertaking that must include all senses. The use of applied poetry has its primary value as an evocative approach to sensing, knowing, and understanding workplace experience. Poetry at its best condenses into relatively few words, metaphors, and images what conventional social science narratives would take much longer to articulate. Where poetry often hints and alludes, narrative seeks to spell out, expound, and complete. Where poetry leaves much mental space for the listener or reader to fill in with one’s imagination, narrative fills in the spaces with rich detail. Applied poetry and its contextual stories offer a way of accessing workplace experience that is unique and valuable in terms of understanding lives at work. The use of complementary psychodynamic theories, like all theories, is a way of trying to account for what we have found and experienced and in particular why it happened. "Why," the authors suggest, is critical in terms of understanding the sensing, images, and metaphors evoked by the poetry and stories that may resonate with hearers and readers for reasons that are unconscious and are rooted in the past. These transferences that come forward from life experience into the present are the critical data we work with. These are the data of psychoanalysis. This book both widens and deepens the scope of organizational research offered by other researchers, theorists, and approaches to understanding, interpreting, explaining, leading, and consulting with workplace organizations. Its triangulating integration of applied poetry, experience and stories behind the poetry, and the three psychoanalytic models of explaining life in workplaces, is a new and distinct contribution to organizational research, leadership, and consulting efforts to help organization members solve real, underlying problems and not offer simplistic, formulaic solutions based solely on a study of the organization’s surface. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational studies, leadership, and management.

This fascinating book shows how an understanding of the psychodynamics of the extended family, from parental relations to sibling rivalries, can provide insight into many of the key issues faced by organizations today. Covering topics such as change management, creativity, autonomous groups, leadership and democracy, it shows how deep-rooted family dynamics unconsciously frame the way we relate to each other in the workplace, and how they can have a profound influence on the broader trajectory of organizations. This book features: Examples on how to use the extended family as a framework for understanding organizational behaviour. A look beyond parental relationships to discuss sibling relationships as well. Examples to illustrate key topics of practical relevance to consultants and managers. Family Psychodynamics in Organizational Contexts is an important read for students and scholars of organizational psychology, organizational studies and psychodynamics, as well as consultants and coaches working in organizational contexts.