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This paper aims to develop a system view of the organizational culture, given entropy of theoretical and methodological outlooks on the phenomenon alongside simultaneous growth of number of research reports.

Sequential structural and ontological analysis of the Schein’s (2004) point of view on organization culture enabled to form a way of system comprehension of the respective object field on conscious and unconscious levels.

Structural ontology of organizational culture is represented by the mythopoetic concept of organization, which is a composition of unconscious motives reflecting standard and management peculiarities of functioning characteristic of a certain group.

The proposed methodological discourse actualizes a hypothesis on organizational unconscious as a specific factor of organizational culture and begets a respective direction of the further research studies.

This is the first methodological concept that provides a system comprehension of the object field of organizational culture. The concept has important implications for methodological designs of further research studies and systematization of already obtained data within the domain.

An overview is presented of some basic psychoanalytic insights into organisations that collectively reinforce the reasons why management studies should concern itself with psychoanalysis. The paper highlights the different psychoanalytically informed approaches that have been adopted thus far in the organisation literature and then raises some issues related to those who seek to use psychoanalytically informed insight to make interventions and manage organisation dynamics.

This study aims to identify the critical barriers to women’s leadership in Indian corporate sector using the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach.

Through data obtained from extant literature and the expert opinion of women seeking higher managerial positions in the Indian corporate sector, this study identified total 18 barriers to women’s leadership. Thereafter, this study used the Delphi technique to identify the most critical barriers and ISM to understand the causal relationship among them, and then ranked them based on relevance.

Of the 13 critical barriers identified, corporate policies, conscious organizational bias and family responsibilities had the highest driving power. By contrast, inadequate career opportunities and the lack of risk-taking ability and assertiveness had the highest dependence power. Unconscious organizational bias and occupational segregation were other prominent barriers.

This study establishes the interrelationships between women’s leadership barriers. It provides a well-defined model which helps to get theoretical insight considering barriers for women leaders in their career progression in the Indian context. Based on the ISM model, these findings can help academicians and researchers gain deep insights into the barriers to women’s leadership in the Indian context, as no studies have been found in the literature concerning the given subject.

Based on the findings, corporations and policymakers can design inclusive leadership policies to support women as they climb the corporate ladder and to enhance their contribution to organizational success.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to identify barriers to women’s leadership in India using ISM analysis.

This paper aims to demonstrate the value of combining the strategic planning process with psychoanalytically informed interpretation through an exploratory case study.

The authors present their experiences and findings from a consulting engagement that began as a strategic planning assignment and soon evolved into an opportunity to explore unconscious forces inhibiting organizational change. The authors, trained in both areas, chose to infuse the two into a combined process that ultimately benefited the organization and suggested novel ways to think about the common process of strategic planning going forward.

The organization's strategic planning process was considerably enhanced, and its outcomes sustained, by illuminating the unconscious forces at work, particularly as they pertain to issues of power and authority in a male organizational culture found to have a profound negative influence upon the quality of the work environment and employee morale. Findings suggest that without a psychoanalytically informed approach, strategic planning would have failed to produce sustainable change.

While the findings reported are from a single case study, the themes explored are likely shared across multiple organizations. There is, therefore, significant potential in combining strategic planning with a psychoanalytic approach to improve organizational effectiveness and employee morale.

Although common in organizations, strategic planning is rarely augmented with psychoanalytic insights. This case study is the first of its kind to show how the two interventions may complement each other.

While Cooperrider (2001, p. 32) suggests that appreciative inquiry is about “the artful creation of positive imagery,” most of the literature that describes the process of artful creation explains it as one in which the organizational members simply talk about these new images, vs. actually engaging in the creation of artistic representations of the desired future. This chapter moves the appreciative inquiry literature beyond the metaphorical understanding of the “art of” appreciative inquiry in order to reveal and explain how practitioners are actually engaging organizations in the artful creation of positive anticipatory imagery. In this chapter, the literature that labels and describes the process of artful creation in organizations is reviewed, described, and synthesized into five propositions – ultimately creating a framework for understanding artful creation as a unique organizational discourse: an aesthetic discourse. These five propositions reveal the common characteristics of artful creation: (1) presentational knowledge/language; (2) mediated dialogue; (3) symbolic constructions that act as metaphorical representation; (4) collaborative inquiry/co-creation; and (5) window to the unconscious. The chapter concludes by addressing the implications, seeking to answer the question “What is the value of an organization engaging with the process of artful creation?” Finally, the chapter suggests that the five propositions may guide future research in two areas: (a) the practice of the artful creation of positive anticipatory imagery in appreciative inquiry; and (b) the further development of a theoretical framework for understanding the “art of” appreciative inquiry as aesthetic discourse.

In the realm of applied psychology, the major factors explaining organizational behavior in the context of organizational intervention are emotion, cognition, and context. In organizational analysis and intervention, however, organizational behavior models explicitly rooted in a theory of mind that assumes and thoroughly addresses their conjoint interplay are rare. To address this issue, we review definitions of emotion and cognition with a view to clarifying their specificity, as well as their differences from similar but potentially confounding constructs (e.g., perception, consciousness, and awareness). We also review the most common definitions of unconscious as a relevant intersection between cognition and emotion. Our ultimate objective therefore is to introduce an interactionist (individual-context) model of both cognitive and emotional levels of functioning of mind, based on what we refer to as the theory of analysis of demand (TAD). Finally, we outline and discuss its related intervention methodology, the Individual-Setting of consultation, Organization (I-S-O) technique.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and explicate the role of the unconscious, from an analytical psychology framework, in the development of managers.

Developing effective managers is an enormous task requiring views from many different perspectives. The lifeblood of all types of managerial work and activity involves relating, understanding, cooperating, and depending on others at both a conscious and unconscious level. In this paper, management development and the unconscious is viewed from an analytical psychology (Jungian) perspective.

Insights are provided from this framework describing how managers might become more receptive and effective in relational skills necessary for the effective management of the workplace.

The paper develops a conceptual framework, which may help managers, through a dialogue with the unconscious, become more receptive to emotion, feeling and subjectivity in workers and themselves. This, in turn, may make them more effective in relating and being related to others.

The influence of affect has become a hot topic in organizational research. This chapter seeks to expand the conceptualization of affect at work to include the role of unconscious affect. In this chapter, we review current research and theory on unconscious affect and extend those findings to organizationally relevant situations. We propose several antecedents, moderators, and outcomes of unconscious affect at work.

The purpose of this paper is to present the proposition that culture in international management has been dominated by a “Western dualism to measuring culture” (Caprar et al., 2015, p. 1024), which has resulted in severe problems and persistent limitations. The suggestion is that cultural research can be more productively conceived as a paradox involving a duality between two contrasting yet co-determined spheres or domains.

The paper provides an outline of culture as a paradox and an outline of a research approach to address the dualities of culture.

A cultural duality is described, which involves a paradoxical “yin-yang” relationship between two contrasting yet mutually constituted aspects of the collective mind. One domain, which involves conscious cognitive elements has dominated research characterized by positivism and empirical cross-cultural explorations of phenomenological cultural values. The second, more recondite domain, involves unconscious and embodied cultural phenomena, which are more tacit and hidden in indirect expression through communicative interaction, exchanges of symbolic representations and embodied behaviour in context.

A methodological duality of qualitative and quantitative mixing in order to provide a bi-focal understanding of both tacit and explicit aspects of culture is proposed as a research agenda.

The suggestion is that these cultural shadows have been relatively neglected thus far in cross-cultural management research. This means that in order to better comprehend culture as paradox, an equalization of approaches sensitive to both sides of the duality is prescient. In pursuit of this idea, a complementary qualitative analysis directed at more nebulous cultural phenomena is proposed in order to provide a balanced analysis of culture as paradox.

The study of group dynamics was central to the field of organization development at its inception. More recently, there has been a move away from considering irrational and unconscious dynamics in organizational life and more attention focused on rational and observable behavior that can be measured and quantified. We introduce the tool, Beneath the Surface of the Burke-Litwin Model, that invites consideration of how the overt behavior of individuals, groups, and entire systems is linked to covert dynamics. This more comprehensive view of organizational life provides scholar-practitioners with a systemic perspective, a view of covert dynamics by organizational level, and support for the ongoing development of one’s capacity for using self-as-instrument when engaged in organization development and organization change efforts.