Group Emotions, Collective Dynamics, and Learning

Moving from individual to collective learning and its associated emotions, our theoretical knowledge originates in the work of Melanie Klein who identified two important mechanisms of defense against primitive anxiety—particularly the processes of ‘projecting’ bad feelings onto others and ‘splitting’ good and bad objects in order to focus on an ideal. The term primitive anxieties represents some of the overwhelming anxieties experienced by all children in early life, including fears of abandonment and betrayal, persecution, disintegration, and mutilation—which can resurface in later life in stressful situations. From these foundations, Elliott Jacques (1955) and Isobel Menzies (1960) developed a theory of the use of social systems as defenses against anxiety, arguing that, in addition to individual defenses, individuals and groups develop collective defenses against anxieties. This theory ‘makes it possible to articulate the dilemma inherent in organizational life between adherence to professed definitions of purpose, and recognition of unthought purposes . . . concerned with providing the subject with an identity—purposes which, when threatened, arouse primitive anxiety’ (Palmer, 2002: 161). When social defenses become dominant they also become dysfunctional for the organization as a whole, because defenses support organizational members’ detachment from their experience. Social defenses do initially reduce anxiety, but they also eventually ‘replace compassion, empathy, awareness and meaning with control and impersonality’ (Kets de Vries, 2004: 198).

The inevitable intermingling of unthought purposes with deliberate intensions highlights further the importance of understanding the continuous connection between power, emotion, and learning in organizations (Vince, 2001). The emotions evoked through power relations promote a tendency towards defensive behavior; towards the evasion of feelings in context; towards the projection of bad feelings onto others as blame or criticism. One of the focal points for the intersection of power and emotion in organizations is the relation between a leader and his or her follower. Many approaches to learning about leadership emphasize the individual leader’s role influence on followers, how in other words leaders may draw on specific traits, styles, and approaches in more or less effective ways. An individual leader may facilitate consensus or may initiate dispersed leadership in a group of followers, but both have to be recognized as political techniques to enhance performance through attempts to make hierarchical relations less overt. Looking at this emotionally as well as politically, ‘leaders first and foremost spin dreams’ (Gabriel, 1999) and they are subject to fantasies, which might stimulate defensive as much as desirable behavior. The leader’s desire may be to share authority, to collaborate in a social context where ‘none of us is as smart as all of us.’ Thus, in organizational settings, individual accountability for outcomes in a political environment implies broader power relations, where regression to a dynamic of control often becomes an inevitable compromise.

Leaders stand at the boundary between rational and non-rational decision making, between realities and fantasies, helping to assess obstacles and to produce the necessary plans to overcome them. To understand leadership in organizations, it is important to understand how emotions are connected to fantasy; how fantasies provide hope or discourage action, as well as how they are communicated, for example, through projection onto others. The leader is never alone; he or she is also a product of the fantasies of followers (and vice versa). Such fantasies inevitably impact on the emotional and political dynamics and experiences surrounding attempts at leadership. The leader may be seen as someone who cares, can read my mind, is indifferent, accessible, aloof, omnipotent, unafraid, hopeless, brilliant, externally driven, or a fraud. In this way, emotional fantasies may reconfigure power relations in different ways, for instance by casting a leader into the role of benevolent mother figure or satanic schemer, and recasting the followers as heroic individualists, passive sheep, or recalcitrant children. All of these projections contribute to the complexity of leadership relations and reinforce the sense in which leadership is a product of the dynamics between self and other.

In organizations, it is impossible for leaders to remain dreamers; necessity requires that vision be turned into reality, something that inevitably calls for the assistance of others. Emotions, both conscious and unconscious, individually felt and collectively produced and performed, are intertwined with the political problems of leadership. For example, it is difficult to uncouple the desire to collaborate in organizations from the compulsion to dominate, or the desire to be protected from the impulse to scapegoat. We often know what good leadership feels like. However, leadership can also be an ambiguous process within a social and political context, one that mobilizes anxiety and self-doubt, encourages insecurity, gives rise to defensive behavior, fosters the development of avoidance strategies, and leads to detachment from reflection and from criticism. Our learning about leadership in organizations is individualistically orientated in part because this approach makes it easier to contain emotions and politics that might be capable of undermining organizational stability and create the potential for organizational learning and change. This individualism protects organizations by always providing the possibility of creating a scapegoat when things go wrong, replacing him or her, and resuming business as if nothing had happened, thus forfeiting all possibilities of learning along the way.

The ways in which leadership is exercised are the result not only of the person who leads or the people being led, but also of the organizational context that shapes leadership. For example, team building is seen as an individual skill that can be taught on management and leadership development courses. However, it may also be useful to recognize that the team builds the individual or individuals who represent and lead them. A team produces the behavior of the leader, as well as the leadership decisions and choices that are voiced, through their conscious and unconscious actions and inactions, through the various ways in which emotions and politics in a team impact on organizing. And team building itself may be a process that is systematically fostered or inhibited by organizational factors small and large, ranging from performance appraisals to the physical location of offices.