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Research shows the benefits of good work friendships on personal well-being, productivity, and engagement — but our close relationships at work can also create a minefield for leaders if they fracture teams into cliques. Here's how to build healthy work friendships that enhance collaboration and performance and humanize the workplace.

This paper employs a psychodynamic perspective to examine the development and maintenance of a leader's identity, building on the premise that such identity work involves both conscious and unconscious processes. We focus on the latter by suggesting that those in coveted leadership roles may engage in projective identification to shape and sustain an identity befitting those roles. Projective identification is the unconscious projection of unwanted aspects of one's self into others, leading to the bolstering of a conscious self-view concordant with one's role requirements. Recipients of a leader's projections may manage these by projecting them back into the leader or into third parties, which may lead to ongoing conflict and the creation of a toxic culture. We use examples from the Gucci family business to illustrate this process.

This article celebrates the vitality of the systems psychodynamic approach and its potential to humanize organization studies, management practice, and working lives. An approach is a deliberate movement: a way to move closer to, inquire about, and deal with something. The systems psychodynamic approach involves moving closer to organizations and workers through research and educational efforts to study and manage the unconscious dynamics of organizing. It aims to reveal the fears, needs, and wishes that underpin rigid structures and dysfunctions in groups, organizations, and institutions—and to foster more adaptive and functional ways of dealing with those impulses. Advocates refer to this approach as 'the work'. This article tells the story of the work as we understand it. We tell it as a life, to highlight the work's intent and evolution, its struggles and contributions, but mostly to make the point that the work is alive. It is alive as an academic enterprise and it is a way of life. An approach devoted to dismantling defenses, countering authoritarianism, and nurturing development and democracy, we argue, is more relevant than ever. And so is what we see as the purpose of the work: fostering pluralism without polarization in human relations.

Building on an inductive, qualitative study of independent workers—people not affiliated with an organization or established profession—this paper develops a theory about the management of precarious and personalized work identities. We find that in the absence of organizational or professional membership, workers experience stark emotional tensions encompassing both the anxiety and fulfillment of working in precarious and personal conditions. Lacking the holding environment provided by an organization, the workers we studied endeavored to create one for themselves through cultivating connections to routines, places, people, and a broader purpose. These personal holding environments helped them manage the broad range of emotions stirred up by their precarious working lives and focus on producing work that let them define, express, and develop their selves. Thus holding environments transformed workers' precariousness into a tolerable and even generative predicament. By clarifying the process through which people manage emotions associated with precarious and personalized work identities, and thereby render their work identities viable and their selves vital, this paper advances theorizing on the emotional underpinnings of identity work and the systems psychodynamics of independent work.

Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of 55 managers engaged in mobile careers across organizations, industries, and countries, and pursuing a one-year international master's of business administration (MBA), we build a process model of the crafting of portable selves in temporary identity workspaces. Our findings reveal that contemporary careers in general, and temporary membership in an institution, fuel people's efforts to craft portable selves: selves endowed with definitions, motives, and abilities that can be deployed across roles and organizations over time. Two pathways for crafting a portable self—one adaptive, the other exploratory—emerged from the interaction of individuals' aims and concerns with institutional resources and demands. Each pathway involved developing a coherent understanding of the self in relation to others and to the institution that anchored participants to their current organization while preparing them for future ones. The study shows how institutions that host members temporarily can help them craft selves that afford a sense of agentic direction and enduring connection, tempering anxieties and bolstering hopes associated with mobile working lives. It also suggests that institutions serving as identity workspaces for portable selves may remain attractive and extend their cultural influence in an age of workforce mobility.