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The purpose of this paper is to introduce and explore stuckness as a felt phenomenon in psychiatric practice in order to stimulate clinicians in mental health settings to be on the lookout for stuckness and on the lookout for unexpected solutions to difficult clinical scenarios.

Signs of stuckness are looked at and then proposed causal factors of stuckness in clinical practice are reviewed. These are divided conceptually into four main groupings: patient factors, clinician factors, service factors and societal factors.

Although clinicians are encouraged to acknowledge when stuckness is present and to try to address possible causes with their patients, clinicians are also advised to work on understanding stuckness as a natural part of creative processes. It is suggested that services should draw on a psychoanalytic ethos to support staff to tolerate and respond to stuckness better.

Feeling stuck with patients’ partial recoveries or “revolving door” cycles is uncomfortable. In stretched psychiatric services in particular stuckness may go unnoticed, and instead the difficulty of the work with patients may inadvertently drive therapeutic mania or rejection of the patients, which can lead to harm. This paper offers a simple scheme to use when thinking about stuck patients in the psychiatric setting with the hope that this can stimulate clinicians to search for new creative solutions for patients.

Emerging research calls for the exploration of the potential negative side of organisational embeddedness. It is important to assess such negative aspects to fully understand the power of embeddedness, and how to address the potential undesirable effects on employees and organisations. The purpose of this paper is to answer this call by assessing the extent to which organisational embeddedness can negatively influence the perceived organisational support-workplace deviance and the organisational trust–deviance relationships.

A sample of 969 employees across the financial services sector in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad is used, with a two-wave research design. Multiple hierarchical regression analysis is used to test the research relationships.

The findings support the propositions that organisational support and trust each negatively predicts workplace deviance and organisational embeddedness moderates each of these relationships in an undesirable way, such that, higher embeddedness weakens the desirable relationships between support, trust and deviance.

This study addresses a clear gap since limited studies explore the potential negative impact of organisational embeddedness on various work perceptions and behaviours. Embeddedness is largely considered a predictor of various desirable employee and organisational outcomes.

This paper aims to offer a personal reflection on the 2012 joint conference of the American Society for Cybernetics and the Bateson Idea Group, “An Ecology of Ideas”. The intent is to raise awareness, through examples, of ideas – and their associated ways of thinking – that the author tends to take for granted in the work as systems theorists as well as in everyday life, yet ideas that confound the very social issues the conferees were trying to address.

The thoughts expressed arose after five days of listening to presentations and discussions, both formal and informal. The approach is conversational, with a desire to stimulate further conversation.

Certain versions of systems theory – whole systems, purposeful systems, systems theory as ideology – rely on ideas that although written about extensively in philosophical and socio-political works go unchallenged in everyday life. Three of these ideas – hierarchy, purpose, belief – are embedded in the way of talking about, and the language used to formulate, solutions to social problems. The suggestion is to avoid or suspend these ideas so that alternatives can be considered.

Idea avoidance offers those who study social change and/or those who participate in making it happen a way to escape the stuckness of ideas so ingrained in the everyday ways of thinking that they go unnoticed.

One of the most perplexing problems in human resource management is how to satisfy and motivate employees who originally joined an organisation with hopes of becoming “stars”, but who discover with time that their aspirations are unlikely to be matched by opportunities. The conventional pyramidal organisational structure guarantees that these opportunities will diminish as employees ascend the hierarchy and that therefore “stuckness” is a problem increasingly to be found the longer is employees' tenure or the higher their level. Faulkner's case studies of an ice hockey team and a symphony orchestra provide vivid examples of this process and its problematic consequences. They also serve as a useful analogue of what may be found in many business organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore change leadership in the context of traumatically experienced change. “Being-centeredness” is proposed as a change leadership paradigm, with the leader becoming a facilitative instrument who assists restoration of a healthy working environment, healed emotions and change transitioning.

This paper is a conceptual research paper. Conceptualizations of being-centeredness are developed by building on the discourse of change emotions in organizations and research on change leadership.

Change interventions are experienced more traumatic than often believed. Healing of these emotions is essential to avoid stuckness. Becoming an instrument of change enables being-centered leaders to assist the emotional healings of victims and survivors when change is experienced as traumatic, promoting individual transitioning, restricting resistance to enhance change readiness and resilience.

Although conceptualizations are supported by an abundance of research and practical experience, as with any conceptual research, it lacks direct empirical evidence to support the conceptualizations.

Being-centeredness is an untapped inner capacity in many change leaders and change interventions. Explicitly normalizing and promoting being-centeredness and the further development of this capacity in leaders will allow this latent capacity to surface from its suppressed state, to be applied overtly.

The paper provides a new paradigm on leaders can and should deal with acute emotions that are often experienced from change, which focus more on the way of being of leaders, than competencies or change activities that must be done. This is likely to further emotional healing, change transitioning, resilience and ultimately change success.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize job immobility concepts, e.g. staying in an unsatisfying job and perceiving limited opportunities to move and apply for another job. The existing literature on this situation of job immobility in which the employee is experiencing stuckness in the job is scattered across research domains, limited in scope and existing constructs are not clearly defined or operationalized.

In this conceptual paper, the authors propose the construct “locked at the job,” by reviewing and building on the job immobility literature and the theory of control and self-regulation.

This study defines the concept that consists of two dimensions as feeling dissatisfied in the current job and inactivity due to perceived limited job opportunities. This study proposes a conceptual model of antecedents and consequences of locked at the job, based on the person-environment fit theory.

This conceptual paper allows value to be added in practice by the conceptualization of locked at the job, in addition to providing a preview with respect to conceptual causes and consequences of this phenomenon.

Research on this job immobility phenomenon is scattered across different research domains, limited in scope and the concept has not been clearly defined or operationalized.

This paper aims to suggest that organizational embeddedness can predict workplace deviance and employee work engagement can moderate the relationship between organizational embeddedness and workplace deviance such that when employee work engagement is higher, the relationship between organizational embeddedness and workplace deviance is weaker.

Employee data were collected from 465 frontline employees across the financial services sector in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad. A three-step multiple hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the research relationships.

The findings provided support for the propositions that organizational embeddedness predicts workplace deviance and that employee work engagement moderates the organizational embeddedness–workplace deviance relationship.

This study addresses a clear gap as limited studies have explored the association of embeddedness with negative work behaviours, such as deviance, and no study have examined the moderating role of engagement in this relationship.

It is clear from work carried out in psychotherapy and family therapy, that individuals and families get stuck because an impasse develops between a conscious desire for change and an unconscious desire to avoid change. The authors consider how this can apply to groups and organisations. It is assumed that organisations are living organisms with conscious and unconscious processes. Five different ways in which organisations “get stuck” are identified and the interventions appropriate to each particular organisation blockage are described.

Volatility and uncertainty are earmarks of the environment facing leaders and organizations today. This article seeks to assert that new mindsets and capabilities are required for leaders to capitalize on the risks and opportunities confronting them. The authors aim to provide a reminder that a leader's experience presents the greatest source of developmental opportunity, but that this is largely an untapped resource. To leverage this resource, a disciplined, deliberate and systematic process for learning from experience is proposed.

Based on years of experience in developing leaders and seminal research on learning from experience, the authors argue for a complete reframing of the way people think of leadership and develop leaders rather than continuing to make the existing approach somewhat better.

This article lays out four pivotal capabilities (vigilance, pattern recognition, mental rehearsal, and response readiness) leaders must use to be effective in this new environment and a three‐stage process for doing so. The tools used in each stage are discussed and examples provided.

This paper shows organizations how to ready leaders for a world that has changed. It makes practical a well‐understood adage in leader development (namely that experience is the greatest source for development by far) but one most leaders and organizations have failed to leverage effectively.