The Fury Beneath the Morphing: A Theory of Defensive Organizing

Building on a longitudinal ethnography of a firm whose leaders attempted to organize collaboratively to remedy a drop in performance, this paper develops a theory of defensive organizing—a process that diffuses, deflects, and displaces overwhelming anxiety, and bolsters the power of established leaders. A systems psychodynamic approach helped us theorize how leaders’ conscious intent to collaborate served as a cover for an unconscious effort to stave off anxiety that they could not share and process. We document the arc of defensive organizing across four cycles that begin between leaders and move across groups until the whole organization becomes mobilized to unconsciously mitigate anxiety. We theorize that a common defense mechanism informs sensemaking and motivates enactments in each cycle, coopting organizing to produce a social defense for psychological and social protection. Defensive organizing consolidates, we argue, when it can shield leaders and members of an organization from anxiety while letting them perform their roles. When it cannot, it collapses, taking the leaders with it. This study extends theory by showing how anxiety can make organizing appear sensible yet fail to be adaptive, and how social defenses evolve over time, keeping leaders’ anxiety in check and anxious leaders in charge.