The Systems Psychodynamics of a Joint Venture: Anxiety Social Defenses, and the Management of Mutual Dependence
Abstract
Joint ventures, mergers and other forms of organizational alliances are rapidly becoming a business necessity. However, on an almost daily basis, experience suggests that such alliances often pose critical dilemmas for those entering into them. Central among these are collaborating across differences in organizational cultures and forging a new organizational identity. At a deeper level, there are also often paranoid concerns and fantasies about the long-term lack of equity in the transfer of knowledge and capability. This paper, therefore, outlines a systems psychodynamic perspective on intergroup and interorganizational relationships for developing an in-depth understanding of some common irrational and emotional difficulties alliance relationships face. It then goes on to describe an illustrative case and concludes with an appraisal of the advantages of a systems psychodynamic conceptual perspective-taking both structure and process into account-which has been neglected or minimized in the literature on organizational alliances.
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6 We prefer to use the term "mutual dependence" to interdependence, since we believe it more directly captures the potential anxieties inherent in such relationships. By contrast, mature interdependence can be viewed as the outcome of successfully negotiating the inevitable anxieties stimulated by mutual dependence.
7 In contrast to "relationship," relatedness refers to the quality of connectedness between individuals or groups that are internally represented, and which, being partially or fully unconscious, are unavailable as clear, articulated thoughts and feelings. As distinct from the manifest experiences of contact, which gives rise to one dimension of the qualities of a relationship, relatedness contains mutual projections, which stimulate other, deeper feelings, which in turn, may affect the relationship in powerful ways as well. At the extreme, relatedness exists only in the mind, as in situations where groups have never met face-to-face, and are, therefore, only mutually "imagined others" (see Shapiro & Carr, 1991).
8 Hirschhorn and Gilmore (1992) have developed a useful framework for distinguishing between qualitatively different kinds of boundaries (identity, political, authority, and task) and their interrelationships.
9 The names of the three companies, the industries they are in, and some of the specifics of the situation have been changed to ensure confidentiality.
10 "Holding environment" is used in the Winnicottian (see, for example, Winnicott, 1965, pp. 230-241) sense of a structure and the way it is managed, that functions, among others, to facilitate development by containing anxiety and distress.
11 "The term a "Fourth Way" was coined by a group of project engineers to characterize the required organization, and quickly became part of the project's increasingly shared language.
12 Considerable evidence suggests that "mental mapping" (Gould, 1987) is a useful methodology for accessing internalized and less conscious representations of an organizational system and can provide a rich source of data and hypotheses about how it is experienced by those taking up roles within it.
13 Miller and Rice (1967, p. xiii) define sentience as "commitment, identity, affiliation, cathexis-to denote the groups with which human beings identify themselves, as distinct from task groups with which they may or may not be identified." This notion is an almost direct parallel to Alderfer's (1987) view that there are two different kinds of groups in the organizational environment: organizational (task) groups and identity groups.
14 A "working note" is a vehicle for feeding back preliminary findings and working hypotheses to a client group, as a basis for dialogue with them (see Miller, 1995). It can be viewed as an organizational analogue to an interpretation in psychodynamic psychotherapy and, as such, is quite different from the formal report of traditional "expert" consultancy.
15 This dynamic is well known to family therapists such as Bowen (1978) who conceptualize the child's maladaptive behavior as a function of the downward displacement of unresolved parental conflicts and anxieties. In connection with organizations, analogous dynamics are outlined by Gilmore (1982).
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