Psychodynamics of Toxic Organizations

<p>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.</p>