A new academic study titled “The Fury Beneath the Morphing: A Theory of Defensive Organizing” offers groundbreaking insights into the psychological undercurrents that shape organizational behavior and leadership effectiveness. Through a longitudinal ethnographic analysis, the study explores how leaders’ conscious efforts to collaborate often mask deeper, unconscious strategies designed to mitigate overwhelming anxiety.
The research introduces the concept of defensive organizing—a process that diffuses, deflects, and displaces anxiety within an organization, ultimately reinforcing the power of established leaders. By employing a systems psychodynamic approach, the study reveals how leaders’ intentions to foster collaboration can paradoxically serve as a mechanism to avoid confronting their anxieties, which they are unable to openly share or process.
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The study meticulously documents the progression of defensive organizing across four distinct cycles, beginning at the leadership level and eventually permeating the entire organization. Each cycle is driven by a common defense mechanism that influences sensemaking and triggers enactments, effectively turning the organizing process into a social defense that offers psychological and social protection.
Significantly, the study posits that defensive organizing consolidates power by shielding both leaders and organizational members from anxiety, enabling them to perform their roles. However, when this defensive structure fails to provide adequate protection, it collapses, often leading to the downfall of the leaders involved.
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This research extends existing theories by highlighting how anxiety can make organizational behavior seem rational while simultaneously undermining its adaptability. Moreover, it shows how social defenses evolve to maintain leaders’ control over their anxiety, often at the expense of true organizational growth and adaptability.
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For executives and organizational leaders, this study serves as a crucial reminder of the importance of addressing underlying anxieties and the potential consequences of allowing unconscious defensive strategies to dictate organizational dynamics. Understanding these hidden forces can help leaders navigate their roles more effectively, fostering a healthier and more adaptive organizational environment.
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One of the authors, Gianpiero Petriglieri, explains the research as follows:
This one is about organizational change initiatives that appear strategic and necessary, generate enthusiasm and hope, consume attention and energy, and then … produce few results and leave the organization worse off.
- Why are they so common?
- How do they unfold?
- How can you avoid them?
Through an in-depth study of one such initiative over four years, Declan Fitzsimons, Jennifer Petriglieri, and I found some answers.
The paper is now In Press at the Academy of Management Journal.
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These “changes” keep leaders’ anxiety in check and anxious leaders in charge.
‘Defensive organizing’ is what we called the process of organizing to diffuse, deflect, and displace anxiety and bolster the status quo.
The longitudinal nature of the study allowed us to document the arc of defensive organizing, from its emergence to its demise, and suggest potential antidotes and remedies.
Navigating the Emotional Turmoil of Leadership: Understanding the “Furious Morphing” in Modern Organizations
”In recent years, scholars have been called to study the “furious morphing” of organizations in a fast-changing “new world of work”.
Emotions can hinder sense- making and hasten enactment.
Hence, sound organizing requires emotion regulation, the conscious “management and modification of one’s own and other people’s emotions”.
Leaders in particular need to attend to emotions to orchestrate “adaptive work” in challenging circumstances .
Faced with turbulence around and within them, however, “even emotionally capable managers may find it challenging to regulate their emotions”.
In today’s rapidly changing work environment, leaders and scholars are focusing on the “furious morphing” of organizations, which emphasizes the dynamic shifts and challenges faced in modern business.
While much attention has been given to the structural aspects of organizing, recent studies highlight the critical importance of managing the emotional turmoil that accompanies these changes. Effective organizing requires leaders to regulate their own and others’ emotions, as unchecked emotions can hinder decision-making and lead to maladaptive actions. This underscores the need for emotionally resilient leadership to navigate the complexities of modern organizational dynamics successfully.
The Hidden Battle: How Unregulated Anxiety is Shaping Leadership in Turbulent Times
Among the emotions likely to overwhelm leaders, anxiety might be the most common and consequential.
Prevalent in uncertainty, anxiety hampers cognitive and behavioral faculties, and can erode people’s sense of them- selves as leaders.
Therefore, those who are called or aspire to lead in turbulent times might find it harder to consciously acknowledge, let alone regulate, anxiety.
This challenge informs our research question: How does anxiety that leaders cannot consciously regulate shape organizing, and how does organizing affect their anxiety in turn?
Anxiety has emerged as one of the most potent and pervasive challenges for executives.
In thıs new research uncovers the profound impact of unregulated anxiety on leadership and organizational dynamics. The study reveals that anxiety, often heightened during periods of uncertainty, can significantly impair cognitive and behavioral functions, eroding leaders’ self-confidence and their ability to effectively guide their organizations.
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”Those who are called or aspire to lead in turbulent times might find it harder to consciously acknowledge, let alone regulate, anxiety.”
How does anxiety that leaders cannot consciously regulate shape organizing, and how does organizing affect their anxiety in turn?
THE ANSWER FOUND BY RESEARCHERS: Anxiety can move leaders to turn organizing into a defensive process, a collective yet not conscious way to regulate anxiety.
The Anatomy of Defensive Organizing: How Anxiety Transforms Leadership and Corporate Dynamics
The research reveals how leaders, when overwhelmed by anxiety—especially during periods of declining performance—may unconsciously transform organizing efforts into a defensive mechanism.
The study focuses on a firm where leadership, anxious about the company’s declining performance, attributed the issues to the existing organizational structure. In response, they initiated a collaborative reorganization effort. However, despite involving more people and expending considerable time and energy, these efforts yielded minimal progress. The underlying reason, as the study suggests, was that these organizing efforts served as a cover for unconscious maneuvers aimed at managing the anxiety of a more uncomfortable truth: the possibility that the leaders themselves might not be competent enough to reverse the firm’s decline.
The researchers introduce a theory of defensive organizing, defining it as a process that serves two key purposes: diffusing, deflecting, and displacing overwhelming anxiety, and reinforcing the power of established leaders. This process begins within and between leaders and gradually extends across groups until the entire organization is co-opted into this defensive mode.
Defensive organizing, our findings suggest, begins within and between leaders, and moves across groups until a whole organization becomes coopted.
For executives, this research underscores the critical importance of recognizing and addressing anxiety within their leadership teams. Understanding how defensive organizing operates can help leaders avoid falling into this unconscious trap, ensuring that their efforts to reorganize and innovate are genuinely effective rather than merely defensive reactions to unacknowledged fears.
Our theory contends that leaders promote defensive organization because it affords them psychological and social protection.
The process propagates and builds upon a narrative that leaders know what needs to be done and can get it done, and suppresses the questioning of that narrative, if only by keeping people busy.
How- ever, the consolidation of defensive organizing rests on its ability to also shield followers from anxiety, and to sustain everyone’s ability to keep performing their roles.
When it no longer does both, our findings reveal, defensive organizing loses momentum and collapses.
The findings reveal that defensive organizing can create a facade of progress, masking deeper issues and preventing necessary change, all while bolstering the leaders’ position within the organization.
For executives, these insights are particularly valuable, highlighting the need to be aware of how unconscious defensive mechanisms can shape organizational decisions. Understanding these dynamics can help leaders avoid the pitfalls of defensive organizing, ensuring that their strategies are truly adaptive and aligned with the long-term success of their organizations.
Defensive organizing, our findings suggest, begins within and between leaders, and moves across groups until a whole organization becomes coopted.
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How does such anxiety influence organizing, and vice versa?
Emotion regulation is particularly important for leaders—or, as we see them here, people in executive roles whose leadership rests upon organizing— because those roles expose them to pressure or ambiguity.
Research on strategy formation and execution has highlighted the importance, for these executives, of managing the emotions that come with it. Huy and Zott (2019), for example, have shown that when executives regulate their own and others’ emotions, they can mobilize human and social capital for the benefit of their firms.
In turbulent times, however, the pressure becomes such that executives may experience emotions that exceed their capacity to regulate them consciously. Among the emotions likely to do so, we focus on anxiety because this emotion associated with apprehension about future harm is prevalent in times of uncertainty, and it is known for its potential to hijack rational cognition and motivate inconsiderate reactions. Furthermore, the conscious experience of anxiety is often regarded as inconsis- tent with the image of a competent and collected leader, and its acknowledgment has been found to diminish people’s confidence in, and frequency of, making leadership claims. Conscious anxiety, in short, might feel and look incompatible with leadership.
We know that leadership involves and rests upon organizing; that emotions trigger organizing yet can also disturb it; and that leaders may, at times, become overwhelmed by emotions, in particular anxiety, that they cannot consciously reg- ulate. How does such anxiety influence organizing, and vice versa?
Researching this question requires relaxing the assumption, prevalent in the studies we reviewed, that emotion regulation is a conscious individual competence, which lets executives recog- nize their own and others’ anxiety, understand its source and effect, and act upon this knowledge.
This assumption is problematic. Research has shown that people manage emotions, especially intense and dis- pleasing ones, in ways that are not always conscious (for a review, see Barsade, Ramarajan & Westen, 2009), and that unconscious processes are often rela- tional and collective (for a review, see Pratt & Cro- sina, 2016).
Understanding the influence of leaders’ anxiety on organizing and vice versa, then, requires an approach attuned to the unconscious and collec- tive management of emotions.
First Cycle of Defensive Organizing: A Group Forms around an Ideal
Second Cycle of Defensive Organizing: Crafting Intergroup Conflict
Third Cycle of Defensive Organizing: An Organization with a Problem
The Fourth Cycle of Defensive Organizing: Failing Back into the Individual
Unmasking Defensive Organizing: How Anxiety Can Derail Leadership and Change Initiatives
The research reveals that leaders might unconsciously use novel initiatives as a cover for their fears of personal failure, a phenomenon that can inadvertently lead to the very failures they seek to avoid.
Scholars have shown that organizational processes such as change, innovation, and responses to identity threat and crises provoke intense emotions.
The theory of defensive organizing posits that when leaders initiate change to distract from their own inadequacies, these initiatives often become problematic themselves. The study suggests that many high-profile change efforts, such as digital transformation projects, may be driven more by a desire to shield leaders from confronting their own deficiencies than by genuine strategic intent. For instance, the rush to adopt artificial intelligence without a clear understanding of its benefits can be seen as an attempt to deflect anxiety about organizational disruption and leadership competency.
To counteract these pitfalls, the study advocates for leaders to develop their capacity to recognize and manage anxiety, both personally and within their teams. This approach, termed “negative capability,” involves treating emotional distress as valuable data, alongside traditional performance metrics. By addressing anxiety openly and tracing it to shared problems rather than viewing it as a personal failing, leaders can foster more adaptive and effective organizational responses.
Creating holding environments—safe spaces where leaders and their teams can explore and work through emotional challenges—is essential for cultivating this capacity. These environments help leaders understand how emotions influence their strategic visions and relationships, ultimately leading to more cohesive and resilient organizations. The study argues that moving away from the heroic view of leadership, which often stigmatizes seeking help, is crucial for making leadership both more effective and humane.
How those emotions may funda- mentally shape these processes, however, has not yet been explored. Doing so would deepen our under- standing of defensive organizing and generate better meso-level theories that link individuals’ experiences to organized processes.
Our study offers a helpful way to understand when emo- tions, or their management, might be underpinning collective processes and be worthy of investigation using a systems psychodynamic lens. In our case, this happened the moment that the Leadership Team shifted from anxiety to excitement despite there being no change in their organization’s performance. Scho- lars should be attentive to situations in which moods seem to shift without a change in circumstances, and inquire into what happened.
This research highlights the importance of acknowledging and addressing the emotional dimensions of leadership and change. By doing so, leaders can better navigate the complexities of their roles, foster genuine innovation, and achieve sustainable success in an ever-evolving business landscape.
Source –
Academy of Management JournalIn-Press Articles
The Fury Beneath the Morphing: A Theory of Defensive Organizing
Declan Fitzsimons, Jennifer Louise Petriglieri and Gianpiero Petriglieri
Accepted by Elizabeth D. Rouse
Published Online:5 Aug 2024
https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2023.0564
NOTE
In this content, university students who took part in our Global Talents Positive Impact project produced a picture using GenAI. We would like to thank them for their contributions.
| The Hidden Forces of Leadership: Unveiling the Theory of Defensive Organizing in Corporate Dynamics | ABDULSAMET DURDU; ANKARA YILDIRIM BEYAZIT UNIV. – POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION |
| Navigating the Emotional Turmoil of Leadership: Understanding the “Furious Morphing” in Modern Organizations | DAMLA TURKMENOGLU; MARMARA UNIV. – JOURNALISM |
| The Hidden Battle: How Unregulated Anxiety is Shaping Leadership in Turbulent Times | ALI MURAT GULTEKIN; SABANCI UNIV. – COMPUTER SCIENCE |
| Anxiety has emerged as one of the most potent and pervasive challenges for executives. | SEVDE KOSE; MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIV. – INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING |
| The Anatomy of Defensive Organizing: How Anxiety Transforms Leadership and Corporate Dynamics | YELIZ COBAN; HACETTEPE UNIV. – ECONOMY |
| Defensive organizing, our findings suggest, begins within and between leaders, and moves across groups until a whole organization becomes coopted. | SAADET DILAN KARTAL; ERCIYES UNIV – SOCIOLOGY |
| Unmasking Defensive Organizing: How Anxiety Can Derail Leadership and Change Initiatives | MELIS AHSEN ARSLAN; KARADENIZ TECHINAL UNIVERSITY – FINANCE |
