Learn · Chapter 12 of 15
Work and organisations
At work you are looking at three things at once: a person, the role they hold, and a group with its own habits and fears. Knowing which one drives the behaviour stops you blaming a person for a role problem, or missing a leader who is sliding under pressure.
At work, identify three things at once: the person, the role they are in, and what the organisation is defending against, meaning the anxieties its work stirs up and the habits it uses to avoid them. A leader's strengths become their derailers under pressure. A derailer is a behaviour that knocks a career or a team off course. A team's habits often protect it from anxiety at the expense of its real task.
How to identify it
- Derailers are overused strengths. The bold leader becomes entitled, the diligent one micromanages, the charming one bends rules, and the dutiful one never pushes back upward. The psychologist Robert Hogan measures eleven of them, listed in the table below. Under fatigue, pressure or new power, people slide toward their derailer, and the people closest to them see it first.
- Confidence is not competence. Groups pick leaders who display confidence and dominance. Those displays are only loosely linked to ability. In hiring and promotion, check track record and what peers say, and give little weight to how someone performs in the interview.
- The group has an unconscious too. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion saw that a group can act as if it met for a purpose other than its task. He called these hidden purposes basic assumptions. They show up as recognisable moods. A team waits for the leader to rescue it (dependency). It finds an enemy, whether a competitor, another department or a scapegoat (fight-flight). It pins hope on a new hire or a merger (pairing). When meetings feel off-task in a strangely emotional way, name the assumption.
- Separate burnout from depression. Burnout is tied to work and lifts on holiday. Depression goes everywhere, including weekends and the things the person used to love.
- Power changes people. Watch anyone who has held substantial power for years for contempt toward advice, merging their identity with the organisation, and reckless certainty. This pattern, called hubris syndrome, often fades once the power goes.
- In family businesses the roles stack. The relationship between parent and child or between siblings runs underneath the reporting line. Most unresolved conflicts there are family conflicts dressed in business language.
The table below lists the main work terms. Read the third column as look-alikes to rule out. The last column says how strong the evidence is.
| Term | What it is | Often confused with | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Psychological safety | A shared belief in a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks: ask a naive question, admit a mistake, disagree with the boss, raise bad news. A property of the group's climate, not one person. | Groupthink; Pluralistic ignorance; Disengagement | Moderate |
| Burnout | A response to unmanaged chronic workplace stress: exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalisation, and reduced professional efficacy (in Christina Maslach's model). ICD-11 restricts the term to the occupational context. | Major depression; Disengagement; Workaholism | Moderate |
| Emotional labour | Managing your own feelings and expressions to meet a job's emotional demands. Surface acting fakes the display; deep acting changes the feeling itself. | Impression management; Expressive suppression; False self | Strong |
| Organisational justice | Fairness judgements along four lines: distributive (outcomes), procedural (process and voice), interpersonal (dignity) and informational (truth and reasons). Procedural unfairness drives resentment more than bad outcomes. | Psychological entitlement; Resentment; Social comparison | Strong |
| Defensive routines (Argyris) | Habits that protect people from embarrassment but stop them finding the problem: send a mixed message, act as if it isn't mixed, make it undiscussable, and make its undiscussability undiscussable. | Social defences against anxiety; Groupthink; Passive aggression | Clinical |
| Theory X and Theory Y | Two sets of assumptions managers hold about people, named by Douglas McGregor. Theory X: people dislike work, avoid responsibility and must be controlled. Theory Y: people seek responsibility and commit to goals under the right conditions. Each tends to produce the behaviour it assumes. | Authoritarian personality; Omnipotent control; Fundamental attribution error | Moderate |
| Leadership derailers (Hogan) | Strengths that turn destructive under pressure, fatigue or power. Eleven: Excitable, Sceptical, Cautious, Reserved, Leisurely, Bold, Mischievous, Colourful, Imaginative, Diligent, Dutiful. | Personality disorder; Hubris syndrome; Dark Triad | Moderate |
| Destructive and abusive leadership | Systematic behaviour by a leader that undermines the organisation or subordinates' wellbeing: ridicule, public put-downs, silent treatment, taking credit. Absent, laissez-faire leadership is also destructive. | Theory X and Theory Y; Power and disinhibition; Coercive control | Strong |
| Peter principle | People are promoted for doing their current job well until they reach one they can't do well, where they stay. The best individual contributor becomes a poor manager. | Impostor phenomenon; Confidence-competence gap; Founder syndrome | Moderate |
| Conflict modes (Thomas-Kilmann) | Five ways of handling conflict on assertiveness and cooperativeness: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating. Trouble starts when one mode is used for everything. | People-pleasing; Passive aggression; Pursuer-distancer | Moderate |
| Change curve | Claims people react to change in grief-like stages: shock, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Derived from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages of dying and grief, which lack evidence. | Grief; Psychological reactance; Resilience | Weak |
| Disengagement and quiet quitting | Withdrawing the self from the work role: doing what is required but no longer bringing effort, ideas or care. | Burnout; Social loafing; Major depression | Moderate |
| Role conflict and ambiguity | Ambiguity: not knowing what is expected, what authority you have, or how you'll be judged. Conflict: incompatible demands from two bosses, two goals, or a clash with your values. | Triangulation; Enmeshment; Impostor phenomenon | Strong |
| Founder syndrome | A founder's identification with the organisation and need to control it hold it back once it outgrows what one person can oversee. | OCPD; Grandiose narcissism; Hubris syndrome | Weak |
| Confidence-competence gap in leader selection | Groups pick leaders on displays of confidence, dominance and charisma, which are loosely related to competence, favouring overconfident and often narcissistic candidates. | Dunning-Kruger effect; Halo effect; Grandiose narcissism | Moderate |
| Workaholism | An inner compulsion to work excessively, with difficulty stopping and guilt or anxiety when not working. The compulsion defines it, not the hours. | Flow; Perfectionism; Burnout | Moderate |
| Counterproductive work behaviour | Voluntary behaviour that harms the organisation or its people: theft, sabotage, deliberate slowness, lying, gossip, incivility, bullying. | Passive aggression; Disengagement; Moral licensing | Strong |
| Basic assumption groups (Bion) | Every group works on two levels: the work group, on task, and a basic assumption group behaving as if it met for another purpose: dependency (a leader will rescue us), fight-flight (an enemy to attack or flee), pairing (two members will produce a saviour). | Groupthink; Scapegoating; Social defences against anxiety | Clinical |
| Social defences against anxiety (Menzies Lyth) | Organisations build structures and habits that protect members from the anxiety of the work, often at the work's expense. In Isabel Menzies Lyth's 1950s study of a London hospital, nurses rotated wards and split into task lists partly so no one bonded with a dying patient. | Defensive routines; Basic assumption groups; Isolation of affect | Clinical |
| Hubris syndrome | A proposed acquired change in people holding substantial power for years: excessive self-confidence, contempt for advice, identifying self with the organisation, loss of contact with reality, reckless decisions. Tends to fade when power is lost. | Grandiose narcissism; Power and disinhibition; Bipolar disorder | Weak |