The Irrational Side of Organizational Life

The irrational side of the workplace has had much light shed on it during the twentieth century. If Taylor ignited the fires of scientific management, Elton Mayo introduced the confounding variable of human nature as an outcome of his early efforts to further extend the precepts of scientific management into the workplace. It is certainly the case that the reengineering of the corporation would have been informed by his work. Mayo (1945) writes,

But for the individual worker the problem is really much more serious. He has suffered a profound loss of security and certainty in his actual living and in the background of his thinking. For all of us the feeling of security and certainty derives always from assured membership of a group. If this is lost, no monetary gain, no job guarantee, can be sufficient compensation. Where groups change ceaselessly as jobs and mechanical processes change, the individual inevitably experiences a sense of void, of emptiness, where his fathers knew the joy of comradeship and security. And in such situations, his anxieties—many, no doubt irrational or ill-founded—increase and he becomes more difficult both to fellow workers and to supervisors. (p. 76)

Mayo’s analysis of work extended to trying to find the best possible way to control employee workplace experience in order to maximize productivity. Employees in his famous lighting experiment just did not, however, behave as predicted. Management could not, it seemed, perfectly engineer the workplace to create a setting where every aspect of human nature was controlled. Indeed, far from it. Many others have looked into the inner life of organizations. An explosion of psychoanalytically informed inquiry that started during the last quarter of the twentieth century has been contributed to by many voices, including the author’s. Two of the earliest authors who advocated this line of inquiry are Abraham Zaleznik and Harry Levinson. An early example of this inquiry is represented by Abraham Zaleznik’s 1966 examination of the nature of leadership. He writes:

I should like to try to lift the veil somewhat on the nature of conflicts in exercising leadership. The two points I want to develop are: 1. The main source of the dilemmas leaders face is found within themselves, in their own inner conflicts. 2. Dealing more intelligently with knotty decisions and the inevitable conflicts of interest existing among men in organizations presupposes that executives, at least the successful ones, are able to put their own houses in order. It presupposes that the executive is able to resolve or manage his inner conflicts so that his actions are strongly grounded in reality, so that he does not find himself constantly making and then undoing decisions to the service of his own mixed feelings and to the disservice and confusion of his subordinates. (p. 31)

Harry Levinson (1968) further underscores the importance of a carefully modulated leadership style within the workplace and the difficulty in achieving this by noting: “The conception of personality developed by psychoanalytic theory has two implicit assumptions. It assumes that personality is a genetic phenomenon, evolving continuously from a changing physical matrix and shaped from experience” (pp. 23–24). He further notes: “This conception assumes, further, that personality is a dynamic phenomenon—that it is a result of many different forces and seeks to maintain its equilibrium” (p. 24). He concludes:“These assumptions about personality underlie two propositions. First, people bring to their jobs attitudes, expectations, and modes of behavior that have evolved from their life experiences. Second, as they work, they are continually trying to maintain their personality equilibrium” (p. 24). The workplace, it may be safely concluded, is filled by human nature that many times defeats the best engineered controls.