ABSTRACT

This chapter sheds light on the emotional connectedness and disconnectedness engendered by two increasingly common events in the life of a firm: mergers, and adoption of matrix organizational structures. In particular, emotional forces aroused by large-scale corporate mergers and their effects upon organizational functioning are not widely understood. Emotional experiences have become split off from formal structures and left to the informal organization to manage and enable integration. If the experiences can be more fully comprehended, it might make for better management of emotional relatedness within organizations, especially during times of catastrophic change. In the context of emotional connectedness in organizations, it is an exploration of organizational psychic reality generated from members' shared phantasies about the enterprise. Organizational psychic reality has its foundations in psychoanalytic clinical methods and group relations theory.