Dysfunctional Organizations

Alan Goldman provides a behind-closed-doors account of troubled leaders and the effect they have on their organizations. Featuring clinical case studies, the text explores the damaging effects of destructive leadership on organizations and provides the tools necessary for early recognition, assessment, and treatment.

Dysfunctional organizations result from individual behavior and the cultures they develop. Many individuals have directly experienced some form of dysfunctional behavior, including trauma from nonfatal workplace violence, bullying, harassment, violence, and unsafe work practices. These and other unacceptable workplace behaviors pose significant problems in organizations. Psychological safety deals with these behaviors and prevents organizations from becoming dysfunctional. It may not be “the” way to prevent dysfunctions, but it certainly is “a” way. This book uses simple and direct words to describe forms of behavior that are obstacles to developing psychological safety. It then provides practical guidance for what can and should be done to remove those obstacles. A unique framework (V-REEL) enables a better understanding of how and why behaviors are associated with dysfunctional organizations. It indicates the value of having psychologically, psychosocially, and physically safe workplaces. Its use helps the reader to carefully identify factors that erode or chip away safe workplaces as well as factors that enable or help to create them.

Libraries as Dysfunctional Organizations and Workplaces expands the "dysfunctional" concept in the professional and academic LIS discourse by exposing the internal problematics of libraries, especially at the social and organizational levels. Including contributions written by LIS professionals and scholars, the book demonstrates that although many libraries do well at attending to users and managing external information they often fail at taking care of their own employees and addressing internal workplace issues. Acadia and the contributing authors explore the problem of dysfunctional libraries so that the LIS profession can come to terms with the systemic dysfunction in their institutions and begin solution-oriented progress toward new and sustainable functionality. The book analyzes the dysfunctional nature of modern libraries, while simultaneously proposing solutions to reduce and alleviate dysfunction. Through theory and application, it takes an explicit practice-based approach with the intent to inform and explain dysfunction as experienced in the library workplace at individual and structural levels and perspectives. Libraries as Dysfunctional Organizations and Workplaces brings the dysfunction discourse to the attention of LIS academics and scholars so that further theoretical and empirical research can proceed from and subsequently be addressed in library and information schools. The book will also be essential reading for librarians and LIS students currently working or preparing to work in public, college, and university libraries.

Organizational dysfunction plagues many of our corporate environments. Within these pages is a theoretical analysis of organizational theories. These behavior of the an organization can contribute or destroy the functional aspects of an organization, further causing the corporation itself to implode. These book provides an approach to analyzing, understanding, and improving an organization.

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.

Since the early twentieth century, scholars have researched leadership and it is one of the most researched topics of our time. Understanding how to be a strong leader and what makes a good leader is something that we continue to strive to understand. Research ponders various positive leadership models such as transformational, servant, authentic, charismatic, situational and ethical leadership to name a few. Yet, we find that a small number of our leaders are truly transformational. While scholars continue to provide examples of positive and influential leaders, we still struggle to understand what a dysfunctional leader is. Practitioners and followers are quick to identify a leader that is a nightmare, yet they can’t name what type of dysfunction that leader possesses. Day in and day out, we struggle with these leaders and how to intervene when dysfunctional behavior arises. This is most evident with recent scandals that have plagued the media involving characters such as Bernie Madoff, Dennis Kozlowski, Tyco, Enron’s Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling. It is vital to understand the importance of dysfunctional leadership and its impact on organizations, followers and society. The recent literature focuses on the psychology of dysfunctional leadership and the destruction of organizations. Little has been written in relation to the characteristics, traits and behaviors of dysfunctional leaders. In addition, little has been included on how to deal with this types of behavior within organizations. Individual books have been written on each of these types of characteristics, but no one book has been written that focuses on all of these characteristics and studies the subtle differences of these behaviors, interventions that can be employed to address this type of behavior and how to recognize the impact on our organizations. Understanding and Recognizing Dysfunctional Leadership will be of interest to professionals and researchers in this field.

A highly effective guide to the use of organizational politics using strategies and tactics derived out of scholarly research.

A work exposing and exploring the phenomena of the dysfunctional workplace is long overdue. This fascinating book does just that, uncovering the subversiveness, counter-productive behaviour and unspoken issues that managers struggle with on a daily basis. This Companion not only explores organizational dysfunction as it concerns individuals, it also examines broader issues of dysfunction and its effects with regards teams, managers and organizational systems. Lively discussion encompasses the symptoms of distress, illness, absenteeism, and inefficiency that point towards behavioural disorders and system-wide malfunction. From personality disorders to wars over territory , the book chronicles and reveals the true nature of often hidden workplace problems including bullying, unethical behaviour, loss of trust, organizational deviance, cowardice, workaholism, negative humour and emotions, personality disorders, mismanagement, and malfunctioning performance and selection systems. So what can be done? Practical solutions to these dysfunctional phenomena are presented by international experts from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including management, psychology and economics. This fascinating, highly original book will be of enormous interest to students, researchers, academics and practitioners across all sectors of business and management, human resource management in particular.