Organizational PTSD

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is no joke. And I am not here to make light of it. Quite the opposite. Why am I using a tragic disorder that can be a resultant factor of child abuse and military combat (among many other causes) to organizations and work life? It is because organizations are made up of people, and anyone in a perceived power position can use it to abuse others, whether they are aware of what they are doing or not. And abuse can be physical, psychological, emotional, and its lesser known subcategory…”informational”. Also, abuse is in the eye of the beholder. Supervisors, managers, and leaders may not consciously know they are abusing you or other employees when they are condescending, obstructive, unclear in their expectations, don’t hold others accountable, or do not support the efforts they ask you to achieve. But we know what that feels like. This is just the beginning.

In dysfunctional organizations, employees can become prey. They are hunted and leveraged for the organization’s needs, all the while being gas-lighted into thinking they are not YET worth what they are being paid, or ready for promotion, and that they’re never going to find a better job. They are continually threatened to produce, marginalized when they do, and given two disrespectful comments for every half-compliment. This is the trap—Intermittent Reinforcement the psychologists call it. Just enough hope to keep going only to be abused, misused, and disrespected once again. Sometimes this is subtle and sporadic, and other times it is overt and ever-present.

You can read Adam Grant, Brené Brown, and Simon Senek, for the psychology, sociology, and optimist leadership lessons on this. I’m so glad they and many other academics are picking up the torch of this cause. My purpose is to bring forth The Elephant Hunter to tag the elephant in the room, so together we can track it and free the organizational truth it represents. For experiencing something akin to PTSD from working in a dysfunctional and toxic organization comes not just from this shameful treatment of employees, but also from the denial that this behavior exists and is wrong. And so I write.