From Organizational Meaning Through Splitting to Organizational Meaning Through Integration: Healing the Great Divide1

This paper explores organizational meaning based on (1) splitting and projective identification, and (2) organizational meaning based on integration. The human animal dwells in universes of significance that we have created. In workplace organizations and their wider cultures, meaning is variously created, constructed, achieved, promoted, projected, internalized, perpetuated, modified, discovered, undermined, destroyed, and revitalized. Since the 1980s in the USA, the various forms of ‘managed social change’ have systematically destroyed the wealth of meaning that work once possessed. These social forms have constricted meaning exclusively into productivity for the financial ‘bottom line’ and short-term shareholder value. They have created millions of disposable Americans and cultivated widespread meaninglessness. The concept of the ‘bottom line’ is, foremost, a cultural category of meaning and only secondarily, derivatively, an economic category. Both workplace ‘motivation’ and the various manifestations of ‘managed social change’ have created and enforced loss of meaning. The ‘motivational’ form of meaning is based on part-objects and narrow instrumental function, while authentic meaning is whole-person based. ‘Motivational’ meaning straitjackets role and identity, while authentic meaning honours their breadth and depth. Organizations, like other cultural units, when faced by problems, crisis, conflict, and trauma, can attempt to ‘heal’ and ‘feel good’ about themselves by creating meaning systems rooted in splitting or rooted in integration. I argue that when organizations attempt to ‘cure’ or ‘heal’ themselves of their problems and construct meaning through splitting, the group psychodynamics involved resembles that of war between ethnic, religious, and national groups. Although in hostile takeovers and swift mergers organizations do not literally spill blood, still, symbolic annihilation is a kindred mental representation of the experience of

death and loss. Massive splitting and projective identification can symbolically dehumanize and annihilate the otherness of the Other (corporate division, firm, manager, worker, the person fired, etc.) and replace it with disavowed parts of the self. The organization can build its meanings rooted in splitting or integration. A widespread contemporary organizational meaning system based on splitting is the corporate ‘silo’, in which members of vertically tall hierarchies view themselves as ‘good’ and others outside the silo - even in the same corporation - as suspect if not ‘bad’ and persecutory. I provide an extended case example of an organizational consultation in which there occurred the beginnings of an evolution from (1) rigid meanings that rested on splitting, projective identification, mistrust, and hostility, to (2) more flexible meanings that rested on greater integration, empathy, and compassion.