I work for a Penn State department that has recently undergone a massive upheaval and transformation of upper management and structure. This has come with widespread policy changes that affect my small team of 30 employees, but also affects other sub-departments, affecting a human capital of at least 200 people. It seems like the management intended changes (like a uniformed dress-code for all members of the department, across the board procedures for training, and commitment to the department’s identity rather than individual programs) for the betterment of the entire department. However, it is noticeable that because my team has always been close-knit among peers and especially in relation to our leader, the effects of these upper management changes have been strenuous upon our group’s dynamic. Using the psychodynamic lens presented by Northouse in our text, I can now unpack what might really be going on within my team of student employees and their relationships, both individual and collective, to our program coordinator, a professional in the field in which we work.
One obvious explanation to the strain on our connection to our leader is the dependency assumption, explained on page 302 of Northouse’s Leadership: Theory and Practice. This assumption explains that followers, lacking autonomy, place all authority in their leader (Northouse, 2016). I believe that because our team is made up of college students, aged in their early twenties, we exhibit huge dependency on our leader, which might be attributed to our desire to be lead in the way our parents lead us in our youth (Northouse, 2016). While this style of followership has been useful in the past in ways that the dependency assumption describes, i.e. in the attainment of goals (Northouse,2016), it is proving to be detrimental to our individual identities as we move through this time of change; it’s clear that we are having issues emerging as leaders to our peers to work through this change together as peers.
Another subconscious quality that our group has exhibited in the past but is now damaging to our effectiveness as we move toward a collective organizational purpose defined by someone other than our immediate coordinator is the fight or flight assumption, also discussed on page 302 by Northouse. Like the dependency assumption our group exhibited in the past, this style of followership was effective in the past but is arguably destructive to our team’s connection to the rest of our department as we have identified so strongly with our small team that we see outsiders as a kind of enemy, which is described by Northouse as a downfall of this subconscious process, especially when the outsider attempts to control the dynamic of our group. In response to our team’s rejection, our leader has taken to “Mirroring and Idealizing” (Northouse, p 303) his followers. Our team does have the tendency to idealize our leader, and when he reflects the admiration we show him, our commitment to our small group grows even more intense, furthering us from outsiders even more. This behavior is obviously unproductive in our current situation when our upper management is trying so hard to incorporate our small team into a larger organization with entirely new leaders.
Moving forward, I think our team could benefit from some of the applications discussed in the Northouse text as we enter this new, broader organization. Group coaching, facilitated by a third party and perhaps guided by our upper management, might allow our team members to express their frustrations and even examine how their style of followership has prohibited them from growing as leaders themselves (Northouse, 2016). This kind of group coaching would also give our leader the opportunity to participate in unpacking his leadership and the psychodynamic forces that could be influencing it, which might open my team’s eyes to the idea that he is not all knowing, empowering us to accept leadership from other sources, such as the management who is trying to create a presence to us now. Most importantly, this kind of intervention has the potential to foster a “willingness to experiment” (Northouse, p 312). In other words, try out the new ways in which management is expecting us to operate, once we have a more collective understanding of what’s going on in our department. If our team is able to see how we’ve been following in the past and how it could be holding us back in the future, I believe we’ll more effectively be able to move forward as an organization.
References:
Northouse, P.G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
ams7704 says
With your statement that “followers, lacking autonomy, place all authority in their leader. I believe that because our team is made up of college students, aged in their early twenties, we exhibit hug dependency in our leader…” I was wondering if this observed behavior is uninformed among all the members of the team? I was thinking that perhaps some of the members exhibit this more than the others or that some might not even fit these responses. This struck me as a bit odd since I have this notion of twenty-something people as craving independence and looking to explore and experiment. Maybe some members of the team may be reacting to the new situation in a different way or confronting it in such a way that new forms of independence are discovered. There appears to be a tendency to speak of the team as if it is united and without faults or differences. It would be much better to look at the variety of responses which definitely can be found in a group.