Seth Allcorn – författare

Understanding experience at work, especially in toxic organizations, is a multidimensional undertaking that must include all senses. The use of applied poetry has its primary value as an evocative approach to sensing, knowing, and understanding workplace experience. Poetry at its best condenses into relatively few words, metaphors, and images what conventional social science narratives would take much longer to articulate. Where poetry often hints and alludes, narrative seeks to spell out, expound, and complete. Where poetry leaves much mental space for the listener or reader to fill in with one’s imagination, narrative fills in the spaces with rich detail. Applied poetry and its contextual stories offer a way of accessing workplace experience that is unique and valuable in terms of understanding lives at work. The use of complementary psychodynamic theories, like all theories, is a way of trying to account for what we have found and experienced and in particular why it happened. "Why," the authors suggest, is critical in terms of understanding the sensing, images, and metaphors evoked by the poetry and stories that may resonate with hearers and readers for reasons that are unconscious and are rooted in the past. These transferences that come forward from life experience into the present are the critical data we work with. These are the data of psychoanalysis. This book both widens and deepens the scope of organizational research offered by other researchers, theorists, and approaches to understanding, interpreting, explaining, leading, and consulting with workplace organizations. Its triangulating integration of applied poetry, experience and stories behind the poetry, and the three psychoanalytic models of explaining life in workplaces, is a new and distinct contribution to organizational research, leadership, and consulting efforts to help organization members solve real, underlying problems and not offer simplistic, formulaic solutions based solely on a study of the organization’s surface. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational studies, leadership, and management.

Understanding experience at work, especially in toxic organizations, is a multidimensional undertaking that must include all senses. The use of applied poetry has its primary value as an evocative approach to sensing, knowing, and understanding workplace experience. Poetry at its best condenses into relatively few words, metaphors, and images what conventional social science narratives would take much longer to articulate. Where poetry often hints and alludes, narrative seeks to spell out, expound, and complete. Where poetry leaves much mental space for the listener or reader to fill in with one’s imagination, narrative fills in the spaces with rich detail. Applied poetry and its contextual stories offer a way of accessing workplace experience that is unique and valuable in terms of understanding lives at work. The use of complementary psychodynamic theories, like all theories, is a way of trying to account for what we have found and experienced and in particular why it happened. "Why," the authors suggest, is critical in terms of understanding the sensing, images, and metaphors evoked by the poetry and stories that may resonate with hearers and readers for reasons that are unconscious and are rooted in the past. These transferences that come forward from life experience into the present are the critical data we work with. These are the data of psychoanalysis. This book both widens and deepens the scope of organizational research offered by other researchers, theorists, and approaches to understanding, interpreting, explaining, leading, and consulting with workplace organizations. Its triangulating integration of applied poetry, experience and stories behind the poetry, and the three psychoanalytic models of explaining life in workplaces, is a new and distinct contribution to organizational research, leadership, and consulting efforts to help organization members solve real, underlying problems and not offer simplistic, formulaic solutions based solely on a study of the organization’s surface. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational studies, leadership, and management.

Codependency is an important psychological aspect of the workplace that adversely affects both those who experience codependency and those who are the subject of the codependent's compelling agenda of interpersonal control. In this important book, Seth Allcorn explores codependency in the workplace beginning with its origins in the family. Many new insights are provided about the characteristic self-defeating and paradoxical patterns of thinking, feeling, and action that also impoverish those who work with the codependent. The author develops important new theoretical perspectives and models of codependency by drawing upon psychoanalytic theory. The three faces of codependency are described for the first time and a sophisticated psychodynamic model of the psychological gridlock of codependency explains the codependent's self-defeating and interpersonally destructive agenda of control. Allcorn concludes his book with ideas about how managers can deal more effectively with the presence of codependency in their organization.The author begins by defining codependency and uses a model to explain how it arises in pathological families of origin. He then describes three faces of codependency and relates them to fourteen common behavior attributes and the workplace. Allcorn explores how this disorder manifests itself in different genders and situations, outlines a learning model and a Family Pathology Matrix, and shows how different pairings of parental behavior contribute to the development of the three faces of codependency. The difficulties which codependency introduces into the workplace is a primary focus, and the book concludes with a search for solutions within the organizational culture that may alleviate the need for codependent defenses and lead to one-on-one interventions at work. This book will be of interest to employee assistance staff, training personnel, counselors and therapists, consultants, and students of the psychodynamics of organizational life.

Despite our national preoccupation with achievement, little attention seems to be paid to the pursuit of excellence on an individual basis. For while it's easy to talk about the collective excellence of an organization, Seth Allcorn argues, no one really wants to be threatened by the superior individual performance of another. In this work, Allcorn examines the paradox of human nature that places individuals of distinction in the position of being rejected and ostracized by their peers. He explores the psychological underpinnings of this phenomenon and suggests ways of revising organizational culture to foster individual excellence.Focusing on the psychological aspects of people and the workplace, Allcorn divides his study into three sections. The first offers an introduction to the search for excellence and discusses the identification of workplace superstars. Also examined are the organizational trends that inhibit individual achievement, the interaction between the superstars and others, and the psychology of office behavior. Section two details the different types of superstars found in organizations and their approaches to achieving excellence. Finally, section three explores some possibilities for adapting current organizational structures to allow and encourage greater pursuit of personal excellence. With its basis in the author's practical experience in middle management, this volume will be a valuable resource for students and professionals in human resource management as well as the management and business fields.

Allcorn explores what it means to feel angry at work. Anger has its origins in anxiety that arises from feeling frustrated, humiliated, and threatened at work. Anxiety creates a biological and psychological readiness to act that is guided by whether it is acceptable to feel angry at work. Employees act responsibly if they feel that their anger is acceptable. They may also act in ways that are destructive to self, others, and the workplace if they feel that being angry is not acceptable. Managing the development of anger and its expression in the workplace is an important aspect in designing a better workplace.The book defines anger and aggression by synthesizing biological, psychological, and social perspectives. The social acceptability of anger and the fear that it interferes with judgement and results in aggression are discussed. Sex and gender-based differences in the experience of and expression of anger and aggression are explored. Learning to cope with anger is discussed. If feeling angry is not avoided then owning one's anger, thinking it through, and acting upon it constructively are important. Anger and aggression can contribute to innovation and productivity. The workplace is, however, a contributor to feeling angry because it promotes feelings of helplessness, persecution, alienation, and worthlessness. Hierarchical organization, power and authority relations, leadership styles, and organizational culture contribute to the development of these feelings. Desires for attachment and the fear of abandonment and desires for autonomy and fear of engulfment in the workplace must be managed to avoid anger. The book concludes by reviewing the relationship between anger and organizational dynamics.

This fascinating interdisciplinary work explores U.S. politics since 2015 and offers psychodynamic insights into the unconscious undercurrents of contemporary culture and politics in the United States.Allcorn and Stein expertly lead readers up the steep learning curve of understanding the Trump era by exploring seven key elements of recent political dynamics. Using the complementary psychodynamic models of object relations, Group Relations and Karen Horney’s tripartite theory, this book makes sense of the Age of Trump and its chaotic world of alternate facts, conspiracy theories, reality TV politics, hoax pandemics, and the sweeping chaos of life in the United States. This sense-making relies on two triangulations. The first represents the complex systemic political scene. The second uses three psychoanalytic theories to understand social, political, and organizational dynamics. This book is a key resource for helping readers know and understand ourselves, our fellow citizens, colleagues, family, friends and what Trump and his followers call "them" such as liberals and foreign immigrants, as well as both the larger polarized social and political context in the United States today. The book also provides concrete examples of how these discoveries can be operationalized both in organizations and at the level of national government and leadership.This book is an essential reading for students in organizational behavior including leadership and how governments operate, as well as behavioral health professionals consulting or offering therapy to organizations.

This fascinating interdisciplinary work explores U.S. politics since 2015 and offers psychodynamic insights into the unconscious undercurrents of contemporary culture and politics in the United States.Allcorn and Stein expertly lead readers up the steep learning curve of understanding the Trump era by exploring seven key elements of recent political dynamics. Using the complementary psychodynamic models of object relations, Group Relations and Karen Horney’s tripartite theory, this book makes sense of the Age of Trump and its chaotic world of alternate facts, conspiracy theories, reality TV politics, hoax pandemics, and the sweeping chaos of life in the United States. This sense-making relies on two triangulations. The first represents the complex systemic political scene. The second uses three psychoanalytic theories to understand social, political, and organizational dynamics. This book is a key resource for helping readers know and understand ourselves, our fellow citizens, colleagues, family, friends and what Trump and his followers call "them" such as liberals and foreign immigrants, as well as both the larger polarized social and political context in the United States today. The book also provides concrete examples of how these discoveries can be operationalized both in organizations and at the level of national government and leadership.This book is an essential reading for students in organizational behavior including leadership and how governments operate, as well as behavioral health professionals consulting or offering therapy to organizations.

Understanding experience at work, especially in organizations that have toxic leaders and dysfunctional organizational dynamics, is a multidimensional undertaking that must include in-depth perspectives informed by psychosocial theory. This may be best accomplished by relying on complementary theories to account for what is found and experienced in our organizations and in particular a better understanding of why this is happening. "Why did she do that?" "Why did he say that?" "Why did a group react the way they did?" “Why,” is critical in terms of understanding organizational dynamics.Our lives at work in large complex and multidimensional organizations are saturated with experience, some of which is fulfilling, and some are of a darker nature that arises from the presence of toxic leaders and dysfunctional organizational dynamics. Understanding these toxicities and dysfunctions and their effect on organization members is approached by first raising their awareness at the beginning of the book before providing psychosocially informed insights that form a basis for understanding and organizational change in the following sections.This book explores these work-life dynamics by grounding them in concrete examples and then using complementary psychoanalytically informed perspectives to illuminate their underlying, often unconscious nature filling an important gap in management and organizational literature.

Understanding experience at work, especially in organizations that have toxic leaders and dysfunctional organizational dynamics, is a multidimensional undertaking that must include in-depth perspectives informed by psychosocial theory. This may be best accomplished by relying on complementary theories to account for what is found and experienced in our organizations and in particular a better understanding of why this is happening. "Why did she do that?" "Why did he say that?" "Why did a group react the way they did?" “Why,” is critical in terms of understanding organizational dynamics.Our lives at work in large complex and multidimensional organizations are saturated with experience, some of which is fulfilling, and some are of a darker nature that arises from the presence of toxic leaders and dysfunctional organizational dynamics. Understanding these toxicities and dysfunctions and their effect on organization members is approached by first raising their awareness at the beginning of the book before providing psychosocially informed insights that form a basis for understanding and organizational change in the following sections.This book explores these work-life dynamics by grounding them in concrete examples and then using complementary psychoanalytically informed perspectives to illuminate their underlying, often unconscious nature filling an important gap in management and organizational literature.

This book presents a unique, in-depth examination of the effects that the popular approaches to management organizational change—downsizing, restructuring, and reengineering—had on a major American hospital. The Human Cost of a Management Failure shows what can happen when management insists on accomplishing its ends strictly by the numbers. The authors ask why top management so often, and with seemingly such a cavalier attitude, selects downsizing and similar methods when research indicates that they are all too often such poor choices. Based on a year-long longitudinal study, Allcorn, Baum, Diamond, and Stein report on their interviews with 23 senior and mid-level hospital administrators, then interpret their findings from a psychoanalytic perspective, to make clear that the human side of the workplace can only be ignored at great risk when change is contemplated and then implemented. This is essential reading not only for corporate management, but also for other professionals and academics throughout the social and behavioral sciences.Readers of The Human Cost of a Management Failure are oriented to the literature on downsizing, restructuring and reengineering, and to the context of the study. Case material follows, enabling readers to draw their own conclusions with regard to the nature of the organizational change and its effects upon the hospital's employees, and consultants offer their own viewpoints. An update of events at the hospital after the study was conducted is provided along with summaries by each author of his own interpretation and how he interprets the others' views. In this way, readers will get an unusual opportunity to evaluate their own viewpoints against those of the psychoanalytically trained researchers, and to decide for themselves whether there are, in fact, better ways to make an organization economically competitive in the marketplace.

Allcorn and Diamond argue that the workplace has become ever more threatening to employees, and that they respond by creating psychological defenses that make the workplace ever more dysfunctional. To keep organizations competitive and sustain the value of their stock, management demands constant improvements in their employees' performance, but often the result is just the opposite of what management wants. Allcorn and Diamond explore this process in depth, and introduce a comprehensive and internally consistent, psychologically informed model of human development and behavior, one that explains for the first time the nature of the psychologically defensive workplace. In doing so, they challenge readers to think systematically about the psychological side of the workplace and to understand the importance of dealing effectively with employee defensiveness. The result is an authoritative study with valuable lessons and immediate benefits for corporate executives, and for scholars and researchers in organizational behavor in the academic community.Allcorn and Diamond's model is applicable to understanding five aspects of the workplace: first, how individuals respond to its stresses and anxieties; second, the psychologically defensive nature of interpersonal relationships at work; third, what the psychologically defensive group processes are; fourth, the dynamics of psychological defenses; and fifth, how the model is used to understand the connection of all organizations to the larger society in which they are imbedded. The authors' goal is to help management understand what actually is going on in today's workplace, the consequence of downsizing and other cost-reduction initiatives, and how important it is for management for relieve the problems they cause.

There's more to work and the life of the organization than just numbers. In his new book on how people function in work settings, Allcorn calls it the human spirit. It too contributes to the life and performance of organizations, but like life itself it can die--or be killed. Allcorn argues that changes in how organizations are managed--downsizing, rightsizing, reengineering, and other catastrophic means--can have an unintended but devastating result. These factors can cause spiritual death--the end of that quality in people that keeps them alive, growing, and productive. Allcorn shows that management and the methods it uses to cope with organizational change must be adjusted to take into account a special kind of workplace spirituality and to nurture it, not destroy it. Indeed, he maintains that by appreciating the importance of the human spirit, and liberating the quality of spirituality into the workplace, benefits to the organization can be profoundly rewarding. Allcorn explains the practical, measurable results of this liberation, documenting his assertions in heartbreaking detail. Even the most tough-minded executive will soon come to consider this book as essential as a spreadsheet.Allcorn asserts that while spirituality inevitably has religious connotations, in his use of the word, it is fundamentally secular and powerfully humanistic. Besides the rationality of numbers and the irrationalities common to a defensive workplace, there is something else that permits members of organizations to rise above workplace adversities. This creates organizational success. As employees are downsized out or just furloughed, the effect on the organization and those who remain is clearly destructive. The author concludes that the way for an organization to achieve success is certainly not by killing its people's spirit by firing them. Other means exist to preserve the organization, and Allcorn explores them in careful, useful detail.

The complexity and dynamism of organizations make them difficult to understand and manage. This book presents the workings and designs of organizations and identifies the types of problems encountered by organizational workers. Allcorn provides an essential focus on dynamic workplace theory, questioning the current and future value of today's bureaucratic, hierarchic organizational structure. Allcorn advocates a shared theoretical perspective that is clear and comprehensive. His theory explains organizational life, encompassing four types of work experience: chaotic, bureaucratic, charismatic, and balanced. He proposes an organizational design that eschews positions of authority and power and eliminates severe, often hindering bureaucracy.Clear and comprehensible without being simplistic, the book offers insights into how organizations actually function and proposes ways to intervene when organizations grow stale, become self-defeating in their missions, or develop into hostile environments for their employees. The insights and ideas presented here are of considerable and enduring importance to corporate trainers, consultants, group process experts, governmental agencies and entities, executives at all levels, academics, and students of organizational life and its various processes.