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Understanding Organizational Culture as the Quality of Workplace Subjectivity

Stritch School of Medicine, Loyola University Chicago, 2160 South First Avenue, Bldg. 102, Room 1614, Maywood, Illinois 60153.

Organization culture contains psychosocial defenses against the experience of anxiety in the workplace. It is, therefore, possible to understand organization culture by the quantity, quality, and permanence of these defenses. Psychoanalytic object relations developmental theory provides a means of understanding psychological defenses. The theory includes three forms of subjective experience, psychodynamics, and psychological defenses-presubjective, intrasubjective, and intersubjective. When these three subjective perspectives are used to understand psychosocial defenses in the workplace, they permit the development of a systematic understanding of organization culture. A taxonomy is provided that uses the three levels of developmental subjectivity and accompanying psychologically defensive processes to understand organization culture. The taxonomy is then found to subsume other theoretical perspectives for understanding organizational dynamics.

Key Words: intersubjective • intrasubjective • object relations theory • organization culture • presubjectivity

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