The Fury Beneath the Morphing: A Theory of Defensive Organizing
基于对一家试图通过协作扭转业绩下滑的公司的长期观察，本文提出了防御性组织理论，揭示领导者如何无意识地通过组织过程扩散、转移焦虑并巩固自身权力。
Building on a longitudinal ethnography of a firm whose leaders attempted to organize collaboratively to remedy a drop in performance, this paper develops a theory of defensive organizing—a process that diffuses, deflects, and displaces overwhelming anxiety, and bolsters the power of established leaders. A systems psychodynamic approach helped us theorize how leaders’ conscious intent to collaborate served as a cover for an unconscious effort to stave off anxiety that they could not share and process. We document the arc of defensive organizing across four cycles that begin between leaders and move across groups until the whole organization becomes mobilized to unconsciously mitigate anxiety. We theorize that a common defense mechanism informs sensemaking and motivates enactments in each cycle, coopting organizing to produce a social defense for psychological and social protection. Defensive organizing consolidates, we argue, when it can shield leaders and members of an organization from anxiety while letting them perform their roles. When it cannot, it collapses, taking the leaders with it. This study extends theory by showing how anxiety can make organizing appear sensible yet fail to be adaptive, and how social defenses evolve over time, keeping leaders’ anxiety in check and anxious leaders in charge.