Unconscious Processes of Organizing: Intergroup Conflict in Mental Health Care

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12611
• Author: Anne Petersen,Elisabeth Naima Mikkelsen,Barbara Gray
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Published date: 01 November 2020

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Unconscious Processes of Organizing: Intergroup

Conflict in Mental Health Care

Elisabeth Naima Mikkelsena, Barbara Grayb and

Anne Petersenc

aCopenhagen Business School; bThe Pennsylvania State University; cPsykInfo Region Sjælland

ABSTRACT A critical but overlooked issue in Weick’s seminal work, The Social Psychology of

Organizing (1969/1979), concerns ‘the heat’ of organizing processes, namely, the underground

emotional processes underpinning the organizing of conflictual work relationships. We present

a qualitative case study of psychiatric agencies mandated by public policy to collaborate but

instead engaged in persistent conflict despite its deleterious effects on their working relationship

and on the wellbeing of the clients they intended to serve. To explain these conflictual features

of organizing, we integrate Weick’s organizing theory with systems psychodynamics to deepen

the understanding of emotions in organizing, specifically the motivational forces underpinning

sensemaking and actions between interacting psychiatric agencies. This integration of theories

reveals a critical feature of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious organizing

processes: When a threat is involved, sensemaking and action are overtaken by social defences,

resulting in dysfunctional organizing of the primar y task. Drawing on these findings, we enrich

Weick’s seminal work by developing a model that portrays organizing as the ritualized interac-

tion of emotions, sensemaking and behavioural responses.

Keywords: conflict, mental health care, systems psychodynamics, Weick’s organizing model

INTRODUCTION

In The Social Psychology of Organizing (1969/1979), Weick presents a comprehensive theory

of the social processes through which organizations emerge. In this classic work, Weick

conceives of organization as the collective outcome of organizing processes by envision-

ing organizational members playing an active role in creating the environment which later

imposes on them. Weick’s work propelled a conceptual shift from viewing organizations

as objective systems to envisioning them as ongoing intersubjective accomplishments

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:7 November 2020

doi:10. 1111/jo ms .126 11

Address for reprints: Elisabeth Naima Mikkelsen, Associate Professor, Department of Organization, Copenhagen

Business School, Kilen, Kilevej 14A, 4. 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark (enm.ioa@cbs.dk).

1356 E. N. Mikkelsen et al.

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

(Gioia, 2006), best studied by using a processual lens (Langley and Tsoukas, 2017).

Eschewing the idea that organizations work rationally toward a specified shared goal,

The Social Psychology of Organizing (1979) emphasizes that through shared sensemaking,

organizational actors collectively construct the meaning of an issue. Organizing then

emerges as they collectively enact the cognitive content of their sensemaking.

This assumption of a negotiated order perspective on organizing is also visible in much

of the scholarly literature on sensemaking that has followed Weick’s original theoriz-

ing. Here, research has been concerned with the development of shared meaning and

how coordinated action may be restored in situations of ambiguity (e.g., Balogun and

Johnson, 2005; Gephart, 1993; Maitlis and Sonenshein, 2010), oftentimes portraying

sensemaking as an ordering force (Maitlis and Christianson, 2014). This focus on or-

dering has come at the expense of acknowledging the sometimes-conflictual nature of

meaning in organizing processes (Brown et al., 2008; Gray et al., 1985 for exceptions).

Nonetheless, in his original theorizing, Weick did allow that dysfunctional phenomena

may in fact be very functional because they comprise people acting in response to what

he calls an organized underground of acceptable behaviour (1979, p. 53), which points to

the emotional underpinning of organizing.

Although Weick himself never specified the qualities of this organized underground, its

specification could enhance our understanding of how emotional processes impact sen-

semaking and potentially contribute to dysfunctional organizing. To explain how Weick’s

(1979) organizing model connects with underground emotional behaviour, we integrate

it with a systems psychodynamic lens (Gould et al., 2001; Menzies, 1960). Systems psy-

chodynamics is particularly useful for investigating organizational processes that appear

irrational because they do not advance the overt organizational task but instead serve

a parallel covert function, which is often to reduce workers’ painful emotions (Gabriel,

1995; Petriglieri et al., 2018). Thus, the value of systems psychodynamics is that it can

shed light on the unconscious processes of organizing, defined as underground emotional

and relational processes (Arnaud, 2012; Pratt and Crosina, 2016; Vince, 2019), and ex-

plain especially irrational behaviour, which have often been neglected in the literature

(see Stein, 2004 for an exception). In particular, instances of intergroup collaboration

may heighten unwanted emotions among group members, leading to the enactment of

unconscious processes of organizing, which can result in dysfunctional conflict between

the groups (Fiol et al., 2009; Gould et al., 1999; Tajfel and Turner, 1979). We there-

fore address the following research question: How do unconscious emotional processes

influence sensemaking and organizing in situations of conflict between organizations

required to collaborate?

To address this question, we conducted a qualitative case study of interorganizational

conflict among Danish mental health care agencies. Because users of mental health ser-

vices need support from both hospital and community organizations at different times

during their course of treatment, service delivery frequently depends on different mental

health professionals working collaboratively across traditional organizational boundaries.

While, at least on paper, such collaborative arrangements appear sensible and comple-

mentary, our case clearly shows a gap between policymakers’ intentions for mental health

care collaborations and their actual outcomes, because they leave the overt task of the

agencies’ – to cure and care for patients – unfulfilled (see Petriglieri and Petriglieri, 2015).