Managing Toxic Leaders and Dysfunctional Organizational Dynamics: The Psychosocial Nature of the Workplace

Understanding experience at work, especially in organizations that have toxic leaders and dysfunctional organizational dynamics, is a multidimensional undertaking that must include in-depth perspectives informed by psychosocial theory. This may be best accomplished by relying on complementary theories to account for what is found and experienced in our organizations and in particular a better understanding of why this is happening. ＂Why did she do that?＂ ＂Why did he say that?＂ ＂Why did a group react the way they did?＂ ＂Why,＂ is critical in terms of understanding organizational dynamics.

Our lives at work in large complex and multidimensional organizations are saturated with experience, some of which is fulfilling, and some are of a darker nature that arises from the presence of toxic leaders and dysfunctional organizational dynamics. Understanding these toxicities and dysfunctions and their effect on organization members is approached by first raising their awareness at the beginning of the book before providing psychosocially informed insights that form a basis for understanding and organizational change in the following sections.

This book explores these work-life dynamics by grounding them in concrete examples and then using complementary psychoanalytically informed perspectives to illuminate their underlying, often unconscious nature filling an important gap in management and organizational literature.

Seth Allcorn, Ph.D., M.B.A. is the former Vice President for Business and Finance at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. Dr. Allcorn has more than twenty years of experience working with physicians, hospitals, and academic medical centers. He has served as a financial and administrative Assistant Dean at the Texas Tech School of Medicine and Associate Dean for the Stritch School of Medicine, Loyola-Chicago. He has also managed two departments of internal medicine for the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of Rochester. He has forty years of experience as an organizational consultant specializing in the management of change, strategic planning, and organizational restructuring. Dr. Allcorn is the author or co-author of fourteen books, half a dozen chapters, and over ninety papers that have appeared in scholarly and practitioner journals. He is a founding member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations.