Critically assess the contribution that psychoanalytic ideas can make to understanding leadership
The science of psychology deals with the mind and the study of behavior in relation to the physical and social environment. Psychology has drawn attention to the importance of behavior as a clue to mind, but inferences from behavior about consciousness were part of expected interpretations of experimental studies. In the context of organizations, a prospective personnel manager needs psychology to understand the problems in personnel selection, placement, morale, motivation, grievances, accidents, tardiness, absenteeism, training, counseling, and other operative functions of personnel management and labor relations. Psychology has contributed much to the science of leadership within the field of organizations.
Leadership within organizations is no easy task. The practice of leadership has been, is, and will be, a continuing fascination for both leaders and academics alike. The corporate world of leaders has been explored as embedded in complex notions of principals and agents, demonstrating that leaders are substantially limited by context and are caught in a conflict of being expected to work with one united goal model in a context of multiple goals. However, admitting the world of values and beliefs requires a broadening of the aspect of leadership away from the functional to include attention to the connection of the societal, the organizational and the tasks and behaviors of leaders. A leader is not a leader in the truest sense if he has no follower, or if he is not within one society or organization.
A leader has to take into consideration not only physical resources but human resources most importantly. Given the differences that are innate in people, it is a challenge to be able to lead them towards a common goal for the good of the company. If the various systems interacting within an industrial or business organization were operating perfectly, there would definitely not be any need for control or leadership. In an ideal organization where every employee, supervisor, and worker acts according to an ideal mode of behavior and conduct toward a perfectly coordinated endeavor, then rules are not necessary.
However, this is usually never the case. In any organization, people that compose it are born with different traits and behaviors, are immersed in different cultures, have diverse characters, interests and attitudes. One cannot expect an ideal mode of behavior and conduct from a group of people coming from diverse backgrounds. Thus, the need for rules as well as effective leadership is necessary. Also, certain standards or norms of conduct must be established and some form of control instituted in order to preserve order and harmony in the organization.
(1992) said that human beings are open social systems, and thus differentiate themselves from inanimate systems in two ways. First and foremost, human beings are considered the basic building block within organization. This goes to say that organizations are social systems and not machine or biological systems. Second, human organizations are very complex, in fact far more complex than any other types of systems that exist (1992).
Unless one knows almost exactly how an individual will behave, act or react under a certain situation, there will be chaos in an organization. This is the reason why organizations have rules, regulations, and policies for the human resource to follow. Otherwise, harmony and success in the field of the organization cannot take place effectively. The rules, regulations, and policies in the workplace are necessary because in most cases the employee’s orientation in the home may be varied and their behavior may not conform with an organization’s expectations. Furthermore, employees or managers may not always play their roles in the same way at all times. But the successful management of the organizational setting may be largely attributed to the leader’s ability to maintain order and discipline.
Aspects of leadership and the behavior of groups therefore need to be understood from the perspective of psychology and psychoanalysis. Everyone knows that an effective leadership from the top requires more than just an education. It needs the leader to adapt and acquire new strategies and skills to be able to cope with the complexity of organizations and the changes that come and go.
Personality and effective leadership are two things related to each other. A leader has to have certain psychological traits or personality in order for him or her to become effective. There are past empirical researches that focused on the determinants of leadership effectiveness, more specifically on discrete personality traits or behaviors of a leader (1997). Truly, in order for executive leadership to be effective, it all depends on the ability of the leader to enact in an adaptive manner to the dynamic, emergent and thoroughly complex situations within any organization (1990). In effect, this certain ability requires the leader to be ready to always develop new knowledge and skills for coping with the organization’s complexities and changes.
Leaders who exhibit the capacity to see, tolerate, and understand difficult and complex patterns of stimulation are more likely than those who do not to find solutions to conflicts in the workplace arising from the differences between their own behavior and personal goals or beliefs and those of the groups they lead. As previously mentioned, it is only normal for an organization to have people with very diverse backgrounds to work for them. A leader cannot expect his or her followers to have the same behavior, traits or beliefs as he or she has. If the leader accepts this discrepancy as it is, then he or she is more likely to be able to come up and provide solutions to whatever dispute may arise in the organization.
This kind of openness must be hand in hand with the leader’s readiness to absorb and accept information from varied and diverse sources. This is only fitting so that it is not only individual and personal goals are considered by the leader but the group’s goals as well, creating integration. This process of the leader absorbing and synthesizing is a needed condition for developing creative solutions and the new behaviors that will transform a simple manager to become an effective leader ( 1997).
Organizations cannot expect their employees to leave their usual behavior at the door when they enter the environment at work. Status seeking behaviors, gossip, dominance, and harassment are all too normal in organizations and thus create conflict, intimidation, and jealousy among employees in the work environment. It is impossible for these behaviors to be completely eliminated. However, they can be understood and considered when organizations create policies. (2000) suggests that, "when considering one's position in an organization, it is advantageous to be socially intelligent, which can be thought of as being skilled at social networking, knowing whom to trust, and being able to form powerful relationships.”
It is understood that individuals need socialization. Since socialization aims at conformity, one form is through social pressure. Individuals act, behave, talk and think in practically the same way. Through socialization within the organization, the individual internalizes the mores and will obey them even when nobody is looking. This means that the employees have internalized the norms that are accepted in the organization. Internalization means making these norms like behavior and attitudes a part of one’s automatic thinking responses.
Once an employee strays or behaves contrary to accepted norms within a workplace, people begin to separate themselves from him. Gradually the employee would then realize that he is becoming alienated from his group. Since man naturally desires approval and acceptance, he learns to conform to the desires of his group or the entire organization rather than provoke chaos. People make real contact with one another in organizational life when they are self-aware of their own boundaries, the limitations they set on those boundaries, and are attentive to the boundaries of others. It is the awareness and attentiveness that is the essence of good contact between leaders and followers and ultimately provide a successful environment within organizations.
Organizations do not need to abandon instrumental goals, productivity, or rationality to develop alternative modes of action just because of differences in behavior. Emphasizing work feelings calls for including what is currently ignored or marginalized in the life within organizations. Rationality is not an objective, immutable state. Rather it is socially constructed and cast as the dominant mode of organizing. Rationality and technical efficiency, however, should be embedded in a larger system of community and interrelatedness, such as in an organization. Perhaps organizations of the future, equipped with a capable leadership, could offer society a new alternative, one shaped by emotionally-connected creativity and mutual understanding as necessary elements for human growth (1993).
A critical pre-requisite to instilling the desired organizational behaviors in everyday meetings within the workplace is an appreciation of awareness. Awareness involves more than just the perception of environment, and entails being conscious of, and understanding, the environment through the use of one’s senses. It this would mean that something has become figured out of the many sensations or events that go on together. The aim of awareness is to enlarge and enrich potentials in the background, so that what matters – what becomes figural – will stand out as fresh, clear and engaging (1987). Therefore an employee who demonstrates traits of responsibility and leadership takes in and processes the vast information related to the environment plus his/her own relationship with it. At the same time, he or she keeps in mind what is the key issue. Awareness alone is not enough; it requires feeding back into the system the fruits of such awareness, re-engaging with the environment and others, to articulate what is thought and felt in relation to oneself and others ( 2002).
Thus, to create harmony within organizations, some form of compromise must exist between the organization and the individuals. Since the employees cannot completely leave their evolved behaviors at their own homes, then they must exhibit some form of control and at the same time take into consideration that they work as a group in an organization and thus their behavior as well as their goals within the organization must be a representative of the group. An individual cannot simply do and act as he pleases within the organization. He must be aware and responsible enough that his actions will mirror and affect the group and the organization as a whole. The leader, on the other hand, has the responsibility to see to it that there is integration of the goals of the employees and the company even with the presence of differences in behaviors and attitudes of the employees. The leader must not force upon his followers to accept his or her own beliefs and behavior for that would not do good for the organization and instead only would create more chaos and conflict.
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