The paradigm of systems psychodynamics: a critique

Purpose This paper aims to evaluate whether the systems psychodynamics paradigm offers meaningful insight into complex and often irrational organizational dynamics. Although organizations are frequently imagined as rational, machine-like systems, they are shaped by human needs, anxieties, resistance to change, and interpersonal and group tensions. The paper argues that systems psychodynamics compromises this understanding. Design/methodology/approach The paper analyzes the scholarship on unconscious organizational dynamics and the limits of rationalist organizational fantasies. It critiques the assumptions of systems psychodynamics by evaluating their alignment with the lived experience of the less than mechanistic realities of human behavior in organizations. Findings The analysis argues that systems psychodynamics is a conceptual non sequitur. It seeks to explain organizational dynamics by imposing a systems-like logic that underestimates the depth and unpredictability of human behavior. By framing organizational life through system-level abstractions, the paradigm risks obscuring individual, interpersonal and group-level psychosocially defensive dynamics that generate nonadaptive nonsystems-like organizational dynamics. Originality This paper challenges the assumption that systems psychodynamics provides a viable lens for understanding organizational behavior. It offers a critique by arguing that the paradigm’s systems framing is misaligned with the inherently human, irrational and nonlinear nature of organizational life.