Summer 2000, Vol. 8, No. 3.

Organisational Consultation

Review and Clinical Utility of: The Neurotic Organization
by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries and Danny Miller. Jossey-Bass 1984

Robert P. Gordon, M.D.
Chicago, IL

First published in 1984, The Neurotic Organization, by Kets de Vries and Miller, provides a solid outline for organizational consultation based upon a psychodynamic model. Kets de Vries draws upon his unique background as a business professor, executive consultant, and practicing psychoanalyst. This experience gave him the opportunity to see how unconscious agendas of executives were mirrored in the organizational dilemmas of their companies. Miller's research had identified recurrent organizational syndromes that seemed to be intimately connected to underlying psychological issues of important people in the firms. Their effort represented a departure from much of the prevailing organizational literature of that time that stressed sociologic or strategic frameworks.

Drawing upon the psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and family therapy literature they outline schema for classifying different kinds of dysfunction in organizations, particularly as characterized by individual styles of managers, superior/subordinate relationships, group styles, and overall adaptive character of the organization. These schemas can then be used to provide a framework for complicated problems that involve both psychological and business issues.

They postulate five dysfunctional organizational types that parallel common neurotic styles (paranoid, compulsive, dramatic, depressive, and schizoid). The paranoid corporation is pervaded by distrust. Energy is focused on external threats leading to a centralization of power and a conservative, reactive business strategy. The compulsive corporation is marked by a lack of flexibility. Initiative is stifled and inappropriate and rigid responses become commonplace. The dramatic corporation is quite different. Corporate decision-making is marked by boldness, risk taking, and flamboyance; often with an entrepreneurial chief executive who follows his own intuitions and dreams. Inactivity, lack of confidence, extreme conservatism and insularity are the chief features of the depressive organization. These companies are extremely bureaucratic and hierarchical. Meaningful change seldom occurs. The fifth type of organization is the schizoid. These companies often have leadership vacuums that lead to destructive gamesmanship among lower level executives. As individual fiefdoms are established, barriers are set up that prevent the free flow of information.

Another approach to organizational style is suggested by Bion's work on shared fantasies that characterize the breakdown of healthy work groups. Here Kets de Vries and Miller talk about three basic assumption cultures, fight-flight, dependency, and utopian. A lack of vision and inflexibility follows from the fight-flight group's concern with external enemies. Internal problems are externalized. In the dependency situation the leader is perceived as omnipotent, and other members feel inadequate. Once a charismatic leader is gone, bureaucratic inertia may take hold. In the utopian mode, often seen in high tech companies, grandiosity and innovation may become more important than practicality and profitability. From the literature on transference they delineate three executive types. In the idealizing style the executive looks to another as an ideal and cannot function effectively on his own. Charismatic, narcissistic leaders require mirroring from others. They lack empathy for others and overvalue their own talents and abilities. Persecutory interpersonal interactions characterize a third kind of leader. This type of executive needs complete control and feels envious of and angry with others. Three additional patterns of superior-inferior interaction are drawn from the family therapy literature (binding, proxy, and expelling modes).

With these schemas in mind and the recognition that multiple resistances are invariably at work, Miller and Kets de Vries offer a very useful, four-step format for organizing a consultation. They suggest that the consultant make a list of the primary symptoms and problems. The next step is to make conjectures about the syndrome, working backwards to discover the roots of the problem. Here one can also make a crucial decision, is this a psychodynamic problem or is another kind of consultant appropriate? If psychological issues are central, then the consultant goes ahead and generates a set of alternative solutions and chooses the one that would have the best chance of working. The next step is implementation. The book ends with a very instructive example of the use of their model in a complex family business situation.

The models that Miller and Kets de Vries present provide the consultant with a variety of frameworks that can be brought to play in a consultation. However, even though they acknowledge that the reality of a consultation can present complex resistances in a variety of ways (ranging from denial, to lack of access, to being fired) they de-emphasize the process skills that an analytically informed consultant brings to bear in such situations. For example, there are times when the consultant is presented with a complex problem, already 'diagnosed' in a self-serving way by the chief executive or business owner. The analytically informed consultant is used to dealing with blind alleys and brick walls and is always attentive to latent agendas. He or she knows that the manifest problem often covers up something far more complicated, and a multiplicity of forces is at work. Of particular importance is the consultant's skill at using transference and countertransference as a basic experiential and diagnostic tool. When boundaries are unclear, resistance high, and rationalization abounds, the analyst is right at home. In family business situations consultants are often called in to resolve escalating battles between entrepreneurial fathers and ambitious children chomping at the bit to take over the company. In one such consultation that this reviewer recently did, a family member described our task simply, "We thought that you could give Bill (the son) a little shrinking and that would be it!" Unfortunately things are never so simple. Often the first job is to get the family out of a defensive stance where they would rather perpetuate the crisis, than come to an unwelcome, though realistic situation. The family may have to accept that their anticipation of a smooth transition with good feelings all around is not to be. In this consultation, the consultants used their analytic backgrounds in a number of ways. They were able to interpret to the father that he was using vagueness as a way to avoid confrontation with his son and keep from facing his own reluctance to hand over the business. We also functioned as auxiliary egos for the father in a way that allowed him to set limits with the son. As a negative transference developed between the son and the consultants, there was a repetition of the "bull in a china shop" behavior that he had manifested with both the father and the employees in the business. In addition, as the consultants became the objects of his rage, it was diverted from the father, and he in turn could respond less defensively and more objectively. Here there were multiple transferences and countertransferences. Some were interpreted, while others were not. The consultants' ability to be able to participate in the fray and use the data to help solve the problem was something that required their analytic training.

Not withstanding the relative deemphasis of the analyst's process skills, The Neurotic Organization is a solid and useful book. For the dynamically trained consultant it provides a range of diagnostic possibilities that can let you see the forest when you feel stuck in the trees. For the consultant who comes from a business background, the book provides an eye-opening look at factors whose importance may have been overlooked. In addition, the bibliography is extremely helpful for further research in this area. As befits a classic volume, The Neurotic Organization continues to offer an excellent introduction to analytically oriented organizational consultation.

 
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