That Unwanted Feeling: A Psychodynamic Study of Disappointment in Organizations

Abstract

This paper explores the emotion of disappointment in organizations and develops a new line of theorizing inspired by psychoanalytic object-relations theory. Existing literature frames disappointment as a threat to organizational effectiveness, as both a response and an anticipation of failure and as an emotion that needs to be managed in order to prevent it from damaging organizational morale and performance. This only captures part of the complexity of disappointment and leaves unexplored its potential contribution to organizational and individual learning and even creativity. The paper develops a theoretical framework which depicts disappointment in three configurations or positions, and it establishes the potential of disappointment acting as an integrative emotion within organizations. The framework accounts for an apparent contradiction in organizational members' experience of disappointment -that it is, at the same time, seen as 'of little concern' to individuals, and yet viewed as capable of undermining stability and destroying positive feelings. The paper shows how disappointment is connected to the dynamics of blame in organizations but, when fully appreciated, can offer a way of moving beyond these dynamics by recognizing partial failure within an organization and turning it into the basis for organizational learning.

Women Rectors and Leadership Narratives: The Same Male Norm?

“…This vision is perceptible throughout the interviews and denotes that, especially for the first interviewee, even if the idea of becoming a rector did not seem plausible in a first moment, as time passed by, they identified (especially the second interviewee) themselves with their role and assumed their performance to be as gender-neutral as possible. The integration in the right networks or the informal mechanisms that allowed them to obtain the support of positional men, as any other possible micropolitical strategies that were developed by these women, were not presented as such, creating the idea that the ascendance of women in academia is only dependent on their hard work, while there is a vast literature demonstrating the relevance of the organisational culture in women's advancement within academia [2,25,59,60].…”

Emotional economic man: Calculation and anxiety in fund management

“…Applications of psychoanalysis to various professional environments were important in sensitizing the authors to potential themes of interest (e.g., Clancy et al, 2012 andHyde, 2015). The interview protocol was developed from the outset in order to both understand in detail the fund manager's approach to investment decision making, and to elicit any emotional processes or psychological complexity that day-to-day fund management work might engender.…”

Theory as Fantasy: Emotional Dimensions to Grounded Theory

“…The subject of my doctoral research was disappointment within organizations, and how this feeling enters individuals’ ways of being and acting in their work lives. The design and theoretical results of this study can be read in a previously published paper (Clancy, Vince and Gabriel, ). However, I want to say a little about the core findings, because they emerged concurrently from my analysis of my data and my emotional experience as a researcher.…”