Adapting to Doom: The Group Psychology of an Organization Threatened with Cultural Extinction

Abstract

This paper illustrates the role of unconscious activities in organizations and cultures. Through a case study, it describes the interplay between organizational fantasies and organizational realities in the political life of a medical corporation. This case study is of the decline of a corporate group that has been slowly allowed by its parent company to atrophy, and of the relationship between the subsidiary, which I shall call Managed Care Affiliate (MCA), and its corporate headquarters. It explores the dynamics of grief-work and of impediments to it posed by a sense of catastrophe. In this paper, I also explore my evolving role as an organizational consultant seeking to help — albeit in a limited way — the subsidiary, MCA, through its protracted uncertainty, rage, and grief. At the descriptive level, the case study interweaves two stories: (1) the story of an organization whose members are haunted by a sense of doom, and (2) the narrative of my role as organizational consultant, a role which both gave me access to the organizational narrative, and provided conflicting expectations for my interventions on behalf of MCA.

In order to be accepted in a culture one must accept or adopt an uncritical attitude toward its customs and its fears.… A consequence of this is unthinking acquiescence and extinction of all possibility of solving the underlying problem. — Jules Henry (1963, p.122)