INSEAD's EMCCC Annals of Psychodynamic Systemic Practitioner

214 Pages·2017·2.43 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Florent

The Annals of
Psychodynamic-Systemic
Practitioner Research
Volume 1

Editors
Elizabeth Florent-Treacy, Senior Lecturer and INSEAD Dutch Alumni Fellow
in Leadership, Diversity, and Governance
Manfred Kets de Vies, INSEAD Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership
Development and Organizational Change and The Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt
Chaired Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus
Roger Lehman, INSEAD Senior Affiliate Professor of Entrepreneurship and
Family Enterprise

Erik van de Loo, INSEAD Affiliate Professor of Organizational Behavior
Managing Editor
Alicia Cheak, INSEAD Research Associate

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First published in 2016
By INSEAD
Boulevard de Constance
77305 Fontainebleau FRANCE
www.insead.com

© INSEAD 2016
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission of the publishers.

ISBN 979-10-95870-00-5

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CONTENTS

CONTENTS ..................................................................................................................... 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................. 6

PREFACE ........................................................................................................................ 7
Elizabeth Florent-Treacy

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................12
Elizabeth Florent-Treacy

PART ONE: THE HERO’S JOURNEY ..................................................................................20
Transitions from Corporate to Independent Careers .......................................................22
Laércio Cardoso
Imposter Phenomenon During Professional Transitions ...................................................35
Inge Maes
Commentary on Part One ...............................................................................................46

PART TWO: INTO THE LABYRINTH .................................................................................48
Identity Challenges of Women Leaders .........................................................................51
Natalia Karelaia
The Glass Ceiling in South Africa ....................................................................................60
Karen Barry
Writing Women into Business School Case Studies .........................................................68
Lesley Symons
Commentary on Part Two ...............................................................................................78

PART THREE: IDENTITY WORK .......................................................................................80
The role of Self-talk in Transitions ...................................................................................82
Nathalie Depauw
Daughters as Successors to Indian Family Business .........................................................95
Sudha Anand
Commentary on Part Three ........................................................................................... 105

PART FOUR: OUT OF THE LABYRINTH .......................................................................... 107
Working Women in Singapore: their Post-Divorce Lives ............................................... 109
Lucia Ballori
Unchildlessness: The Transition from Childlessness ...................................................... 117
Hestie Reinecke
Fair Process and Transgender Transition in the Workplace ........................................... 126
Angela Matthes
Out of the Closet, into the Boardroom ........................................................................... 137
Stevin Veenendaal
Commentary on Part Four ............................................................................................. 150

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PART FIVE: FACILITATING TRANSITIONS ..................................................................... 152
Women’s Leadership Identity: Coaching in Practice ..................................................... 154
Alessandra Agnoletto
Delegation: A Key Enabler for Senior Female Leadership Transitions ............................ 161
Martine Van den Poel
Commentary on Part Five ............................................................................................. 172

PART SIX : ADOPTING AN INCLUSIVE, SYSTEMIC APPROACH...................................... 173
From Individual Career Dilemma to a Family’s Adaptive Challenge ............................. 175
Toya Lorch
It’s the System, Stupid: The Exodus of Talent from elite Professional Service Firms ........ 187
Claire Pointing
Commentary on Part Six ............................................................................................... 205

Conclusion: DEVELOPING NIGHT VISION AND THE NIGHT VISION PARADIGM ........... 207
Erik van de Loo and Roger Lehman

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are deeply grateful for the generous support provided by the many donors
to the INSEAD Dutch Alumni Fellowship in Research in Leadership, Diversity,
and Governance.
We also thank the chapter authors for their unflinching and honest inquiries
into organizational life, Hazel Hamelin for editorial support, and Isabel
Assureira for publishing assistance.

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PREFACE
Elizabeth Florent-Treacy

There are many versions of the apocryphal tale about the business school
professor who invited a group of senior executives to attend the Academy of
Management conference, an annual event that brings together thousands of
academics in management science disciplines, where researchers from around
the world vie for slots to present their latest findings, with well-known academic
“rock stars” filling conference halls to capacity.

The story goes that the professor proudly shepherded the executives through
seminars on all sorts of new and innovative topics. At the end of the four-day
conference, he asked the group what they had learned. “Well, most of the time we
had no idea what you academics were talking about,” they responded. “It didn’t
sound like what you think is important has any link to our daily reality.”

Indeed, in the field of management science - what we do in business schools -
rigorous scholarship may not be seen as relevant by members of organizations
themselves. Publications like the Harvard Business Review and some books on
management trends bridge the rigor-relevance divide well, but in general,
management scholars have created “a closed industry engaged in producing
knowledge intended mainly for other academics.”1 Indeed, “academia can be a
competitive and self-serving environment in which researchers appear to be using
the people they study to advance their own careers.”2

For obvious reasons, this is not ideal, neither for academics nor business people.
As one observer ironized: Why go to the trouble of conducting research and
writing articles that are only read by three people: your editor, your mother, and
one envious colleague?

Clearly, organization studies could focus more closely on “the wider world’s
work.” 3 As Argyris insisted in 1970, organizational development research

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interventions should involve entering into an on-going system of relationships, to
come between or among persons, groups or objects, for the purpose of helping
them.4 But all too often, academic studies are “lost before translation,”5 that is,
they are based on theoretical ideas that are irrelevant to practice and therefore
doomed to stay in an ivory tower.

As a result, most of the new ideas in management that catch on in organizations
come from the world of practice, not from empirical academic studies.6 This poses
an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, people in the world of work are coming
up with applicable ideas that academics might not have access to; on the other,
the valuable contributions of academics are not fully exploited in the business
world.

What if we were to bring the two worlds together more often? What if academics
were to partner with real world practitioners? What if business people learned the
craft of inquiry and applied it to organizational challenges? The potential reward is
evident: pragmatic contributions to the study of organizations and a new approach
to exploring organizational dilemmas for the practitioners themselves.

Contributions of the EMCCC Annals of Psychodynamic-
Systemic Practitioner Research
The first contribution of this collection is to show that business people can indeed
do this kind of research. Virtually all of the contributors here began their research
journey with some misgivings: “I have never written a research paper before and
I’m not sure I can do it.” The journey from there to here - the work you are about
to read - is a story in itself.

In this series of collected works the authors answer the call to “embrace the idea
that we are charged with the responsibility of generating useful knowledge” [italics
in original text].7 Even more exciting is that the studies have been conducted not
by academics but by the protagonists themselves. All the contributors are
graduates of INSEAD’s Executive Masters in Coaching and Consulting for
Change (EMCCC), and the papers collected here are short summaries of their
theses.

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The pedagogical design of the thesis element of the program can be summarized
as follows: “What skills, awareness, understanding and ways of working do
change agents need, and how can these be learned in ways that are dynamic,
enduring and internalized? How can we help learners bridge the worlds of
experience and theory, integrate their personal reflection with critical analysis and
action, and draw from the strengths of diverse methods of inquiry?”8

In creating this program, now in its fifteenth year with over 500 graduates to date,
we deviated - quite radically - from the standard business school approach. We
began with a vision and an objective: to provide business professionals with a
new lens through which to see their world holistically—starting with themselves
and moving outward to family and group dynamics, and life in communities and
organizations. We provide a space in which they can safely explore and
experiment with different identities, including that of practitioner researcher.

This program is offered by a top global business school – INSEAD -where the
predominant paradigm is left-brain thinking. This is not unique to INSEAD. Since
the middle of the twentieth century, the emerging discipline of management
science has been grounded in an empirical approach to research and teaching in
attempt to align it, in terms of empirical rigor, with other hard sciences. At
INSEAD, as at other business schools, the case study method (with a
preponderance of male protagonists) combined with data-heavy content is still the
dominant pedagogical paradigm. Final exams are the assessment method of
choice, and starting salary after graduation is an important measure of success.

As a result, one of the first things we have to do is convince our EMCCC
participants that they too can contribute to the body of knowledge in this field; in
fact, as practitioner researchers they are at the forefront of making organizations
better in multiple ways.

Over the span of the 18-month program, faculty and participants co-create a
supportive environment in which they test different ways of knowing and learning.
They write continuously, beginning with reflection papers and moving on to case
papers in which they reflect on the issues they face in their respective context.
They write practicum papers using various methods to observe and act in their
world: participant observation, organizational ethnography, and action research.

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The EMCCC program takes a dialogic approach, seeing organizations as
constructed of multiple realities and intersecting social systems. This view
emphasizes sense-making over objective truth.9 Data collection is “less about
applying objective problem-solving methods, and more about raising collective
awareness and generating new possibilities that lead to change.”10

The second contribution of these collected works is the unifying “red thread” that
runs through them all: the psychodynamic-systemic approach to the study of
organizations. “Psychodynamic” means that they explore the underlying
motivational factors and past experiences that influence current behavior patterns;
“systemic” means they consider the influence and interconnection of context, for
example, family, the organization in which a person works, and national culture. In
brief, this paradigm, which is described in greater detail in the next chapter, not
only identifies challenges and issues at the business level, but draws attention to
the deeper sources of energy and motivational forces that give impetus to, or
create inertia against, human actions in organizations.

By considering the way subconscious forces and need systems interact, it is
possible to gain an understanding of individual, group, and organizational
schemas—the “templates” that affect behavior. A greater awareness of
problematic relationship patterns can provide an opening to explore and work
through difficult issues in the here-and-now, and uncover options for new
behaviors or actions. In short, applying psychodynamic-systemic concepts to the
ebb and flow of organizational existence contributes to our understanding of the
vicissitudes of life and leadership.

An EMCCC executive master’s thesis is a tangible result of the dialogic
organization development orientation described above. We frame the theses as
exploratory studies, but what emerges is much more than a detached, intellectual
description of what is happening in the wider world of work. EMCCC practitioner
researchers bring a much richer and deeper insight into the “why” behind thorny
organizational dilemmas. They look into the penumbra of the logical, showing us
what we did not see before. By exploring the “why”, ultimately we can advance
towards the “how” i.e., pragmatic and sustainable options for change.

A third contribution of these chapters is the authors’ global perspectives and their
position as participant-observers. Many of them consider well researched topics,
but they add to our body of knowledge in that they look deeply into a specific

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