Organizational Schizophrenia: Towards a Conceptualization and Scale Development

Organizations today are facing a lot of external turbulence and internal turbulence. Central to these problems is the people working in organizations and their problems. One of the problems that is of great importance but less talked about is organizational schizophrenia. It is a corollary drawn from the term “schizophrenia” of clinical psychology which is a psychological disorder. Many of its characteristics apply to organizations as well such as lack of alignment of policies and goals of the organization, double bind paradox, reality detachment and so on. Psychosis in organizations has been well studied and established. It is imperative to mitigate this psychotic problem in organizations before it assumes menacing proportions. But mitigation requires measurement. A four-factor scale consisting of 19 items which can measure the extent of organizational schizophrenia has been developed in this paper. Some of the challenging issues/ factors responsible for creating a schizophrenic organization were found to be confusion in corporate policies, leadership behavior, work environment and culture, trust, support and employee engagement.