William A. Kahn

To Be Fully There: Psychological Presence at Work

This article develops the concept of psychological presence to describe the experiential state enabling organization members to draw deeply on their personal selves in role performances, i.e., express thoughts and feelings, question assumptions, innovate. The dimensions of psychological presence are described along with relevant organizational and individual factors. The concepts implications for theory and research about the person-role relationship are described.

Holding Environments at Work

Holding environments are interpersonal or group-based relationships that enable self-reliant workers to manage situations that trigger potentially debilitating anxiety. Working from a theoretical framework woven of concepts from developmental and clinical psychology, group dynamics, and organizational behavior, the author describes holding environments, the conditions that facilitate their creation, and the points at which they are vulnerable to failure. He also discusses the group, intergroup, and organizational contexts that shape the extent to which holding environments at work are realistic or desirable.

Holding Fast : The Struggle to Create Resilient Caregiving Organizations

Part 1: The Nature of Caregiving Organisations. Caregiving Organisations Defined. The Stress of Caregiving Work. Resilience Under Stress. System Breakdowns. Part 2: Disturbances in Caregiving Organisations. Caregivers and Casualties. Authority at Work. Divided They Fall. Teams, Real and Imaginary. Politics. Running in Place. Part 3: Leading Caregiving Organisations. The Leadership Task. Negotiating Dependency. Leadership and Change. Final Reflections.

Facilitating and Undermining Organizational Change: A Case Study

This article offers a case study of a research-action project in which the author functioned as researcher and change agent. The success and failure of this project was related to his finding and losing the balance of joining and remaining separate from a social system’s dynamics. The author describes the research project and reflects on its covert dynamics. In doing so, he illustrates the relationship between helping system members get unstuck from their automatic, dysfunctional patterns of relationships and getting himself unstuck from those patterns. He describes as well the forces within him and in the system itself that pulled for him to lose his balance, such that he either tumbled into it as a member or fell away from it altogether. He frames the learnings in terms of change agents creating or undermining the holding environment in which system members struggle to change dysfunctional relationship patterns.

An Exercise of Authority

It is difficult for members and students of hierarchical organizations to think about their own unacknowledged, enduring biases and predispositions to react to authority-their own and that of others. It is easier to assume that we are rational, dealing with authority figures exactly as they deserve. If they deserve our respect, loyalty, and commitment, we offer it to them. If those over whom we have authority are appropriately respectful, diligent, and committed, we are respectful and supportive. The working assumption in both cases is that we deal with authority solely based on the

The Revelation of Organizational Trauma

This article describes a process by which organizations and their units may experience trauma, which is revealed through dysfunctional patterns of individual, group, inter-group, and organizational behavior. I illustrate this process in the context of an action research project with a hospital’s surgical unit whose presenting symptoms involved the inability of staff members to work together effectively. The article concludes with a discussion of principles of movement that enable group and organization members to create patterns that get them unstuck in how they work and function.

Layers of Diagnosis for Planned Relational Change in Organizations

Planned change innately involves shifting relationships and patterns of interaction. Social network analysis can make these patterns visible and so help target interventions. Yeta great deal of conscious and unconscious interpersonal dynamics that should also be considered exist beneath the surface of such patterns. This in-depth case study illustrates how clinical and network approaches to diagnosis can reveal different change interventions. Three principles for combining clinical and social network techniques are identified. First, in addition to viewing structure as constraining action, networks should be considered as symptoms of deeper organizational issues. Second, networks should be understood normatively in terms of rational task requirements but also in terms of other, less observable (and possibly irrational) needs of organization members. Finally, analysts and change agents are best served by developing relationships of trust when applying social network analysis and interpreting patterns in ways meaningful to those being assessed.

Group Resilience: The Place and Meaning of Relational Pauses

Recent scholarship on resilience has shed light on the processes by which organizations absorb strain and maintain functioning in the face of adversity. These theories, however, often focus on the operational impacts of adversity without accounting for the strain it puts on organizational members and their abilities to work effectively together. We apply a relational lens to better understand how adversity, and the anxiety it triggers in people, affects processes of organizational resilience. This conceptual frame enables us to begin uncovering the relational micro-dynamics underlying the absorption of strain. Drawing on group relations theory, we describe two trajectories of intragroup behavior in which strain, in the form of adversity-triggered anxiety, is either acted out or defused. In the brittle trajectory, group members react to anxiety with defensive patterns that leave them vulnerable to effects of adversity. In the resilience trajectory, groups defuse and mitigate adversity-triggered anxiety through a reflective process we call “a relational pause,” ultimately leaving them strengthened and resilient. We elaborate the model by exploring the potential fragility of relational pauses and likely factors that influence groups’ ability and tendency to enact resilience.

Lost in Familiar Places: Creating New Connections Between the Individual and SocietyLost in Familiar Places: Creating New Connections Between the Individual and Society, by ShapiroEdward R. and CarrA. Wesley. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991, 193 pp.,

This article presents a review of the book “Lost in Familiar Places: Creating New Connections Between the Individual and Society,” by Edward Shapiro and A. Weslev Carr.