Adaptability of modern leaders: psychoanalytic aspect

Psychoanalysis of leadership

Abstract

The events of the last two years are forcing companies to look for the most adaptive and versatile leader, able to effectively manage the team and at the same time remain in harmony with himself. The ability of a modern manager to adapt his management style to the external conditions and current business tasks, as well as the ability to maintain internal ambivalence, stability, is separately based on a specific set of his individual components. This work aims to explore how the quality of the already existing experience of regulating conflicts of ambivalence (internal support) and the quality of healthy dependence of the manager (use of external supports), which exist in his intrapsychic world as «internal working models», are related to his adaptability, are expressed in his organizational behavior and his level of emotional well-being. For this, a study was carried out with four cases, where each of the cases went through three stages, including quantitative, qualitative and expert methods of analysis. The results obtained confirm the hypotheses which werestated in the study about two key factors of manager's adaptability: the ability to rely on internal objects and to be dependent on external objects.