The Neurotic Organisation (Part 1)
- Nicholas Toko
- 4 days ago
- 14 min read
'Remember, it is the secret force hidden deep within us that manipulates our strings; there lies the voice of persuasion, there the very life, there, we might even say, is the man himself’
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.
We spend a lot of time at work, so it should come as no surprise that it's where we encounter some of life's toughest challenges, really pushing our personal limits. These challenges often come from dealing with other people and show up in our relationships. Many of you might have thought about quitting, or know someone who left a job, because of a particular relationship with a colleague. There are lots of reasons why a relationship might get rocky. I'll dive into how the unconscious plays a part in creating bad workplace relationships and how this shows up for individuals, teams, and the whole organisation.
This is the first blog in a 7-part series exploring the ‘neurotic' organisation. Using clinical, medical and psychiatry recognised personality disorders, I will look at the neurotic and borderline personality styles of leaders and managers of troubled companies and the implications of neurotic and borderline personality for the manager/employee relationship. I argue that there is an invisible hand at work in organisations: decision-making, leadership, strategy formation, organisational structuring and change are influenced in subtle and complex ways by invisible, long-standing psychological forces or covert psychological processes of which the individual is usually unaware. This creates outcomes which are dysfunctional, irrational in a behavioural sense, pernicious and destructive.
The aim of the blog series is to raise awareness and understanding about how unconscious dynamics induce neurotic personality styles and dysfunctional leadership/managerial styles, and their organisational manifestations and repercussions.
My objective is to present the reader with a body of knowledge and principles that will be of use in understanding, diagnosing, and perhaps ultimately dealing with organisational problems. Get back to the ‘human problem’ in organisations which is even more important as we increasingly encounter the ‘AI problem’ in organisations.
I hope you will enjoy reading the blog, learn a thing or two, but most importantly, gain insights into the impact of the unconscious and neurotic and borderline personality in the workplace.
The Hidden Life of Organisations: The Unconscious at Work
The unconscious is a classic psychoanalytic term used to describe mental contents that the ego or our conscious self can't directly access. It's a psychic place with its own character, laws and functions. You might be familiar with it or perhaps entirely forgotten about it, you ego taking centre stage in your consciousness. The concept of the unconscious makes us think about why some things pop into our conscious awareness while others don't. This is because (a) the quantum of energy alters and (b) how strong the ego is decides what can become conscious. The key is how well the ego can communicate and engage with what is discovered in the unconscious. If the ego is pretty strong, it'll allow certain unconscious content to surface into conscious awareness. Over time, this can help shape personality in a unique and transformative way. Dreams are a good example of unconscious content. If you wake up in the morning, write down and reflect on your dreams, suggests that you have a conscious relationship with your unconscious. If you are aware that you dream but dismiss it as crazy night time nonsense then we would say that you are not in relationship with your inner world. The unconscious is mainly, or potentially, creative and works to benefit the individual. However, when it is left to its own devices, it can wreak havoc for the ego and for others.
Therefore, the unconscious in active relationship with the conscious ego is an untapped source of personal transformation, it can help you to improve your resilience, better understand yourself and others, develop more effective personal and work-based relationships, find creative solutions to long-standing problems and a source of inspiration, knowledge and wisdom. The unseen and unknown unconscious dynamics can also have unintended and less constructive, even damaging, consequences for you, the people around you and the workplace. Getting to know your unconscious can help you to address emotional issues (intrapsychic relationship) and improve your relationships with others (interpsychic relationship).
On the flip side, the unconscious is a source of covert, shadowy contents which an individual can be blissfully unaware of. These covert intrapsychic contents can then influence organisational, group and interpersonal behaviour in a dysfunctional way and even motivate an individual’s resistance to change in an organisation.
Personality
The unconscious is what I would describe as the hidden life or forces in organisations which can inhibit leadership and management activities such as effective strategy making, organisational structuring, group and team dynamics, leadership and decision-making.
Kets de Vries and Miller (building on their 1984 book The Neurotic Organization) argued that companies can develop characteristic ‘neurotic styles’ that mirror clinically recognised personality disorders usually because the dominant fantasies, anxieties, and coping style of the company’s leader or leadership gets imprinted onto the company’s strategy, structure and culture over time. The leader or leadership’s inner world or unconscious essentially becomes ‘shared’ through the company’s decision-making processes, culture and even its strategic blind spots. The neurotic individual personality is a blind spot for the modern company. Grievance culture, resistance to change, impaired performance, poor employee engagement and commitment can be traced back to conscious/unconscious conflicts which the individual acts out in the workplace.
The broader point to make is that organisational dysfunction often can’t be fully understood by looking at the structures and strategies alone - I also argue that you need a psychoanalytic or psychological lens on leadership and management to see why certain unhealthy patterns persist in organisations. HR as a profession has lost its way and forgotten the importance of human psychology plays in organisational culture.
So let’s start off with a short exercise.
Personality Self-Assessment: Describe yourself and a significant other in your life.
So one of the things I do when I present Personality to a group is ask them to write a self-description and a description of a significant other i.e. to describe themselves as a personality and of a significant person in their life.
I think this is a very useful thing to have people do because individuals who have neurotic (and psychotic) personality have a lot of trouble writing a self-description and of others. It's a deceptively simple task which is actually very difficult for individuals with personality pathology. They will tend to write descriptions that are highly polarised, highly idealised in the ways they view themselves. I look at their self-description and of the significant person in their lives to see if they're able to in the description of others keep themselves out of it to some extent. I would ask myself the following questions:
Q1
Do they really value the significant person for their otherness and sense of uniqueness?
Q2
Do they give a deep and well-rounded picture of that person or is it a superficial self-referential picture of the person?
Q3
Do they describe themselves as a combination of positive and negative traits or are they presenting an idealised version of themselves?
The self-description asks questions that get to abnormal or neurotic personality characteristics, so that can make somebody more aware of how they're experiencing themselves and other people.
So what is Personality? Everybody uses it but when you think about it, it isn’t a simple concept to describe. Personality is described in many different ways and there is a lot of debate within psychological and personality circles about what it is and how to define it. I see it as the internalised sense of who we are that we incorporate over the course of our life from childhood to adulthood.
Everybody has a personality, or a characteristic manner of thinking, feeling, behaving, and relating to others. For example, some people are typically introverted and withdrawn, whereas others are more extraverted and outgoing. The idea of an introverted and extraverted personality are fundamental aspects of the Jungian theory of psychological type. Some people are conscientious and efficient, whereas others might be consistently undependable and negligent. Some people are characteristically anxious and apprehensive, whereas others are typically relaxed and unconcerned. These personality characteristics are often felt to be integral to each person's sense of self, as they involve what people value, what they do, how they would like to describe themselves, and what they are like most everyday throughout much of their lives.
For me, the best definition of personality is provided by the British Psychological Society:
‘Those relatively stable and enduring aspects of individuals which distinguish them from other people, making them unique, but which at the same time allow people to be compared with each other’.
A useful definition of personality within the context and analysis of neurotic personality and personality disorders which we will look at in the next section.
Everyone’s personality is unique. Our personalities are not only shaped by the world around us but also shape the way we view the world. They affect how we act and think, what we believe and how we relate to others. How our personalities develop can be strongly influenced by our genetics, childhood, environment, experiences in early life. For some people some of these early experiences are difficult or traumatic. These experiences can impact how an individual’s personality develops.
Personality is also central in predicting a wide array of important life outcomes such as well-being, social acceptance, relationships, marital status, educational and academic success, criminality, unemployment, physical health, mental health, and job satisfaction.
Neurotic Personality and Borderline Personality Disorders
As you might have gathered from the short exercise at the beginning of this blog, every person has a personality, longstanding ways of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about oneself and others. However, when these traits, characteristics, behaviours, attributes, temperament are inflexible, maladaptive, and cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress, they constitute a personality disorder. A person with neurotic personality is likely to comprehend the concept of personality whereas as person with a borderline personality disorder is unlikely to comprehend the idea of a stable, enduring feature of their own or another person’s personality.
We all have certain dysfunctional neurotic characteristics. These might involve shyness, depression, irrational fears, suspicion, control, anger, moodiness and so on. Everyone shows some of these characteristics sometimes but occasionally people exhibit a good number of negative personality characteristics that all appear to manifest on a common basis. They display these characteristics very frequently, so that their behaviour becomes quite rigid and inappropriate. These individuals usually do not appear to be sick, they do not exhibit bizarre behaviour and they do not have to be treated by a psychiatrist in order to function well in day-to-day organisational life. But their inflexible behaviour does limit their effectiveness as a leader or manager. It consistently distorts their perceptions of people and events and strongly influences their goals, their modes of decision-making and even their preferred social setting based on whether they have preferences for introversion or extraversion.
The clinical and psychiatric literature identifies a number of neurotic and borderline personality styles. The infographic below shows how normal and abnormal personality is scientifically understood from a clinical, medical, psychiatric and psychoanalytic perspective. There are different types of personality disorders, colour coded by the three clusters, and ranging in severity from mild to severe. Neurotic personality tends to be ‘mild’ whereas Borderline personality tends to be ‘severe’.
Neurotic, Borderline and Psychotic Personality Disorders
Notes on Neurotic and Borderline Personality
Normal personality: This type of personality has an appreciation of reality, harmony with oneself, one’s inner world and with others, the external world, a good balance between the attitudes of introversion and extraversion, and realistic sense of self and a realistic sense of others.
Neurotic personality: This type of personality knows at some level that their problem is in their own head.
Borderline personality. This type of personality does not attribute problems to themselves, it is often others who are the problem.
Psychotic personality: This type of personality believes the world is out of kilter. There is a break from reality or a loss of reality.
People with Cluster A personality disorder can find it hard to relate to other people. Their behaviour might seem odd or eccentric. They may have issues in social situations. This cluster is related to the more severe psychotic disorder of schizophrenia, but in a milder form.
People with Cluster B personality disorders can find it hard to control their emotions.
People with Cluster C personality disorders have strong feelings of fear or anxiety. The C cluster includes people who tend to be excessively anxious, overly reliant on others for sense of security and self-esteem, overly moralistic, perfectionist, and highly critical of others.
What is a Personality Disorder? Cavaiola and Lavender (2000) describe personality disorders as a special group of psychological disorders of which the general public and most workplaces are generally unaware.
Personality disorders are disturbances in a person's capacity to relate harmoniously to the psychosocial* environment (extraversion) and to his or her internal needs (introversion) has onset in infancy or childhood.
- Otto Kernberg, Psychiatrist & Psychoanalyst.
*psychosocial: interactions and dynamics between the social environment and the individual’s personality. A combination of self-understanding, social relationships, and the behaviours and emotions that support connections between a person, their inner world and their social world.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, American Psychiatric Association describes a personality disorder is an enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive, and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to significant impairment or distress.
The International Classification of Diseases, ICD-9, World Health Organization) describes personality disorders as severe disturbances in the personality and behavioural tendencies of the individual, not directly resulting from disease, damage to the brain, or from another psychiatric disorder. They usually involve several areas of the personality and are nearly always associated with considerable personal distress and social disruption. They are usually manifest since adolescence and continue throughout adulthood.
It is estimated that approx. 11-18% of UK population has a personality disorder and approx. 20-23% of global population has a personality disorder. These are large numbers when you think about the size of the UK (69.5m) and global population (8.3b). You are bound to meet and work with someone who has a neurotic or borderline personality disorder.
On the ‘severe’ side or spectrum of personality disorders, we can observe the following:
Affects the main areas of living or major life tasks: work, profession or studies, love and sex, social life, creativity, wellbeing and enjoyment of life. Disordered personalities lose awareness of their feelings, and how their mind works.
Distinctly different and potentially have more of an adverse impact on others, for example, in a work setting, compared to other mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety or substance misuse disorders. These mental health conditions tend to impact the ‘mood’ of the personality and not affect the personality structure. For example, a usually extraverted individual with depression may suddenly appear introverted.
Distinctly different because from the outside disordered personalities look quite normal, they are functional in the workplace and in social relationships.
Disordered personalities are potentially more destructive in social, family and workplace settings because they are generally difficult for the average person to identify and even more difficult to deal with in the work setting.
Disordered personalities show up as a combination of abnormal behaviours or inhibition which are an enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive, and inflexible, has an onset in childhood, adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to significant impairment or distress. Normal personality behaviours become personality disorders when they are inflexible and make people unable to adapt to the needs of the moment.
Personality disorders prevent personal growth and adaptation. Sense of self and others is not accurate, problems with their thinking and emotions, their gut reaction to the slightest trigger in any given situation is inappropriate, it happens automatically, and when it is disordered it makes life difficult, complicated and miserable.
A personality disorder can affect a person’s emotions, how the person copes with life, and relationships. They may find their emotions confusing, tiring, and hard to control. This can be distressing for the person, and others. Because it is distressing, they may find that they develop other mental health problems like depression or anxiety. They may also do other things like use alcohol or drugs, or self-harm, to cope with distressing emotions.
Their beliefs and ways of dealing with day-to-day life are different from others. They may find it difficult to change them.
Personality disorders differ from mental illness such as bipolar disorder, depression, ADHD. With these illnesses we see disruptions in brain chemistry that are responsible for these illnesses which may affect a person’s personality. Personality disorders also differ from neurodivergent behaviours and characteristics.
Personality and Organisational Effectiveness
To explore the interdependencies between organisational strategy, culture, process, systems, group dynamics, technology, organisational structure and leadership/management personality, some research points to the power of using common clinical psychology insights and frameworks as organising schemes for understanding the root causes of organisational problems.
The link between personality and organisation, aka the intrapsychic and organisational dynamics, examines the human psychological roots of organisational life, the mental or intrapsychic processes of leaders, managers and employees using psychoanalytic based models of the mind. I am using Jungian psychology or the analytical psychology concept of the unconscious to shed light on the repercussions.
Personality styles can explain a multiplicity of behaviours. The focus is on clinically recognised clusters of behaviours that remain relatively stable over the years, as opposed to simple dimensions of behaviour. These better enable us to make a link between personality and behaviour in organisations.
The unconscious, dreams, fantasies, beliefs, and aspirations of leadership influence the nature of the organisation. The organisation then characterises one’s internal theatre, one’s picture of the world, which underlies and determines behaviour and which comes to broadly influence and epitomise what is often called ‘personality’. Over the course of the blog, I will focus on neurotic personality and three borderline personalities: schizoid, borderline and narcissistic. Each of these styles gives rise to particular problems of strategy, structure, decision making and culture.
I would like to make the case for making the link between intrapsychic phenomena, as manifested by neurotic and borderline style, and organisational adaptive characteristics. I am not talking about the fantasies in the whimsical sense of daydreaming, but about complex and stable psychological structures that underlie observable behaviour. The dominant fantasies of an individual are the scenes that prevail in his private theatre, in his subjective world. They are the building blocks making for particular neurotic and borderline styles and are therefore determinants of enduring behaviour.
Research on Disordered Personalities at Work
Psychologists Dr. Belinda Board and Prof. Katarina Fritzon at the University of Surrey are best known for their landmark 2005 study Disordered personalities at work. They compared the personality profiles of senior UK business managers against forensic psychiatric patients and found that executives exhibited several psychopathic and disordered traits, such as narcissism and manipulativeness, at equal or higher rates than the criminals. Their research shifted the focus from demonizing "psychopaths" to understanding how corporate culture rewards "dark" personality traits that can ultimately derail a business
Board and Fritzon interviewed and gave personality tests to high level British executives and compared their profiles with those of criminal psychiatric patients at Broadmoor Hospital in the UK. They found that three out of 10 personality disorders were more common in leaders/managers than in disturbed criminals.
Senior business managers - Histrionic Personality Disorder
Chief executives - Narcissistic personality disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Personality disorder
Personality Disorders prevalent in senior management teams
The first was histrionic PD, entailing superficial charm, insincerity, egocentricity and manipulativeness. There was also a higher incidence of narcissism: grandiosity, self-focused lack of empathy for others, exploitative and independence. Finally, there was more compulsive personality disorders in the managers, including perfectionism, excessive devotion to work, rigidity, stubbornness and dictatorial tendencies.
Research suggests that some psychopaths operate within mainstream society, also known as successful psychopaths, in senior business management roles.
Without history of arrest and imprisonment
Charming façade
Great skill at influencing people
The reason why people with a personality disorder profile, such as that of the business managers sample, progressed to positions of legitimate power of authority rather than some socially deviant alternative remains perplexing. Seek out and develop relationships with people of the highest authority and to show tremendous skill at influencing them. People driven by needs of power, dominance and prestige (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) often seek and end up in leadership positions.
The senior business manager group appears to possess personality disorders to a degree that is equivalent to and at times exceeds the Psychopathic Disorder (PPD) and Mentally Ill (MI) patient groups, elements of borderline and psychopathic personality organisation which closely resemble characteristics known to be beneficial to achieving in a senior management role. However the group does not have elements of borderline and psychopathic personality organisation that are associated with a deviant or criminal lifestyle.
Reflections on Neurotic and Borderline Personality
I have shared a lot of information about the nature of personality to make the case in subsequent blogs about the impact of the unconscious on organisational success. In the next blog, I will further examine the nature of neurotic and borderline (borderline, schizoid and narcissistic) personalities and their impact on the organisation. Each type has its specific characteristics, motivating fantasy, and associated dangers. I will also show how each of these styles parallels to a certain type of organisation with specific strategic behaviour, culture, and organisation structure. Some organisational culture can be shaped by a single leader or by a coalition of leaders.
Neurotic and borderline personalities share a common dysfunction. A conflict between their conscious and unconscious mind. The ego of the neurotic is subtlety or even mostly unaware of the conflict, whereas the ego of the borderline is unaware of their inner conflict. The lack of awareness creates the conditions for the acting out of the inner, unconscious conflict in the workplace, and sets the scene for the neurotic organisation.
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