Organizational Pain And The Modification Of Organizations

Abstract

Models of organizational modification—commonly understood as organizational learning, change, and resilience—do not explicitly theorize the nature and treatment of organizational pain, even as scholars have noted suffering and pain as legitimate organizational phenomena. We define organizational pain as the suffering of organization members that result not from their personal lives but from their work roles and contexts. Existing models tend to focus on modification operations from cognitive or structural perspectives.

Working from a systems psychodynamic perspective, we argue that such operations are covertly shaped by how organizational pain is encountered. We begin with a brief review of current perspectives on organizational learning, change, and resilience, noting the absence of explicit mechanisms for addressing pain activated by organizational disturbances. We then offer process models that map, respectively, the mistreatment and treatment of organizational pain, and their respective implications for organizational capacities for learning, change, and resilience. We conclude by articulating theoretical contributions to those literatures, implications for empirical research, and
practical meanings for organizations and their leaders.

Presenter

Bill Khan is an organizational psychologist (PhD, Yale University) and is currently Chair and Everett Lord Professor of Management and Organizations at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. He teaches, publishes, and consults on organizational learning, change, and resilience, often focusing on caregiving organizations such as hospitals, public welfare agencies, and other public and health care settings. He is particularly interested in how issues such as burnout and engagement are shaped at multiple levels of analysis—individual, interpersonal, within and between groups, and organizational--and the interplay of both conscious and unconscious dynamics