Anxiety is an emotion that has been widely discussed in relation to learning. Learning involves success and failure, trial and error, triumph and disappointment, presenting individuals and groups with formidable uncertainties and self-doubts liable to trigger anxiety. A common understanding of anxiety is that it is fear without an object—we can’t easily say what makes us anxious. Here, we are using the word in the sense of an apprehensive expectation, or ‘the expectation of a danger’—something to be avoided or controlled, because it ‘incites the feeling of being uncomfortable’ (Salecl, 2004). ‘Being uncomfortable’ is a common emotional state in organizations; indeed emotions have been described as ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ within organizations (Vince, 1999). Anxiety is a major aspect of human experience in organizations. We are not using the word anxiety here as a clinical term, but as ‘a primary aspect of human experience’ (Salecl, 2004). However, categories applied to the clinical diagnosis of anxiety also provide a general idea of the key components of everyday anxiety in organizations. These include: feelings of being ‘on the edge,’ keyed up, wound up, or nervous; the inability to relax; frequent preoccupation with painful thoughts; stress that is out of proportion to the subject matter of the thoughts; feeling apprehensive, a sense of being on the brink of some disaster; feeling restless, a need to be ‘doing’/to be on the move; anticipating the worst; and difficulties in concentration.
Anxiety is an emotion that can emanate from the self, but equally may be co-created through interactions between people; it can be infectious both as a paralyzing and as a galvanizing force. Learning anxieties in organizations can afflict both individuals and groups and are capable of generating both paralyzing and productive effects. For example, anxiety about performing in public can be the very feeling that makes such action possible or impossible. Anxiety can provide the energy necessary to risk performing in public, as well as underpinning the fear and desire to avoid such performance. This dual potential of anxiety, to generate both insight and ignorance (Vince and Martin, 1993; Vince, 1998), has a profound impact on the organization of learning (as well as individuals’ learning in organizations). Its management and containment is therefore an important aspect of the task of leaders and teachers alike.
An important starting point in understanding anxiety at work may be to recognize that ‘what really produces anxiety is the attempt to get rid of it’ (Salecl, 2004). This process can be seen within individuals, in groups, and in organizations. For example, consider the white manager who is reluctant to provide feedback on work performance with a black member of staff because she is anxious of being accused of racism. The manager’s anxiety has already produced the discrimination she was seeking to avoid. Think of the MBA group that is anxious about the cultural and racial differences in the learning group. Their declaration that ‘we are all equal in this group’ makes difference almost impossible to talk about. Their anxiety reflects an unspoken awareness that differences are already making a difference in the group, and that it needs to protect itself from the imagined conflicts that might occur if this subject is spoken about.
Important as the management of anxiety is, in its very essence, it can generate additional anxieties, for example, by shifting the blame or making scapegoats of other people. If I do not want failures to be my fault then they must belong to someone else, to other people, or other parts of the organization where poor management, bad practices, or bad attitudes prevail. Anxieties about being seen to fail create blame of ‘the other’ and such blame undermines the ability of people within the organization to communicate across sub-system boundaries or to learn from honest mistakes (Vince and Saleem, 2004). In this example, anxiety about problems of communication is reinforcing communication problems in the organization. Individual and group attempts to address anxiety are referred to by psychodynamic thinkers as psychological defenses against anxiety. Some of these defenses, like shifting the blame or rationalizing away failure, may be conscious. Others, however, operate unconsciously as individuals and groups seek to fend themselves off from the unsettling effects of anxiety. These may include flights into fantasy, such as ‘we are invulnerable, no-one can hurt us,’ or denial ‘this cannot possibly happen,’ or ‘this could never happen again.’ Defense mechanisms then are a group of psychological processes aimed at reducing painful and troubling feelings, notably anxiety, or at eliminating forces that are experienced as threatening the integrity or mental survival of an individual or a group. These defenses, including projection, repression, denial, and splitting, seek to protect individuals, groups, and organizations from pain and anxiety, but the result can be precisely the opposite, since they may immerse them in individual or collective delusions or wish-fulfilling fantasies, whose result is to exacerbate organizational problems and failings. Under such circumstances, failure does not become the mother of success, as the old Chinese saying would have it, but the mother and grandmother of more failure.