Understanding the Invisible Psychology of Organisations
Sandra is renowned for her insightful approach to coaching leaders and leadership teams. With years of experience as an organisational psychologist and master coach, she brings breadth and depth to her work. She combines robust psychological theory with a practical approach to individual and team development.
Imagine joining a senior leadership meeting in an organisation you have never visited before. You know very little about the people around the table. You have read the strategy and looked at the organisational structure, but within a surprisingly short time, you begin to notice things that appear nowhere in either document. One person speaks frequently, and others defer to them. Another starts to say something, hesitates, and decides not to continue. A potentially difficult subject is raised, and somehow, the conversation moves elsewhere. There is laughter, but you find yourself wondering whether some of it is relieving tension rather than expressing amusement. The Chief Executive asks for a challenge, yet something about the response that follows suggests that challenge may not be quite as welcome as the words suggest.
Nothing dramatic has happened. There is no obvious conflict. Nobody has behaved badly. Yet there is something in the room.
Most of us recognise this experience. We describe an atmosphere as tense, cautious, warm, defensive, competitive, energised, or flat. We may even say, “There is something going on here, but I can't quite put my finger on it.”
I have become increasingly interested in that something.
It is what I think of as the relational field
My current working definition is that the relational field is the continually emerging, cocreated psychological and systemic environment generated by the interaction among people, relationships, roles, structures, histories, power, emotions, and unconscious processes. It both shapes and is shaped by how people think, feel, and behave.
This way of thinking moves us beyond the idea that organisational behaviour can always be explained by understanding the individuals involved. Sometimes we need to look not only at what is happening within people, but at what is emerging between them.
That distinction matters.
Consider a new Chief Executive arriving in an established organisation. Early in their tenure, they tell the leadership team, “We need much greater accountability.”
It sounds like a straightforward statement. But words do not enter neutral territory. One member of the team hears clarity. Another hears criticism. Someone who experienced the previous Chief Executive as controlling hears the same story beginning. Another person, frustrated for years by poor performance, feels relieved. Someone whose department has recently been criticised wonders whether the comment is really directed at them.
The Chief Executive notices hesitation around the table. Perhaps they interpret that hesitation as resistance and respond by explaining more forcefully what they expect. Team members experience the increased direction as evidence that this new leader intends to control them. They become more cautious about what they say. The Chief Executive notices their caution and concludes that the organisation has an even greater accountability problem than they first thought.
Nobody has deliberately created this situation. Yet a pattern is beginning to form.
And herein lies something important about the relational field, we create the field, and then the field begins to shape us.
The Chief Executive influences the team, but the team also influences the Chief Executive. Their responses affect the leader's behaviour, the leader's behaviour, in turn, changes their responses. Each interaction alters what becomes possible in the next.
Before long, people may begin to talk about the Chief Executive as controlling, while the Chief Executive describes the team as passive and resistant. Both may believe they are simply describing the other. From a relational perspective, however, a more interesting question emerges, what are they creating together?
This does not remove individual responsibility. Nor does it suggest that all parties have equal power or influence. Organisational relationships are shaped by hierarchy, role, and authority. But it does invite us to become curious about the circular processes through which behaviour develops and becomes reinforced.
It also requires us to consider history. People do not enter organisations psychologically empty-handed. We bring previous experiences, assumptions, expectations, relationships with authority, and familiar ways of protecting ourselves when we feel uncertain or threatened.
But neither are we entering empty systems.
Organisations have histories, and those histories leave psychological traces. A founder may have left twenty years ago and still exert an extraordinary influence over how the organisation thinks. A painful merger may rarely be discussed, but it continues to shape relationships between the two parts of the business. A previous leader may have encouraged compliance and punished disagreement. An organisation that once survived through extraordinary effort may continue to equate exhaustion with commitment long after the original crisis has passed.
The event is over. The relational pattern may not be.
Transactional Analysis gives us a useful way of thinking about this. Eric Berne's concept of group imago describes the psychological picture we develop of a group and our place within it.
When we join an organisation, we quickly begin to work things out. We notice who has influence and who does not. We learn who can challenge whom. We discover which conversations are acceptable and which are safer to have outside the meeting. We notice whose knowledge counts, where alliances exist, and what happens when somebody steps outside an expected role.
The formal organisational chart tells us one story. Our experience of relationships may tell us another.
Gradually, we construct an organisation in our minds. But we are not simply observers gathering objective information. We interpret what we encounter through our own previous experiences and expectations. We then behave in response to those interpretations, other people respond to us, and our internal picture of the organisation changes again.
The organisation we experience is therefore partly outside us and partly constructed through our participation in it.
This becomes even more interesting when we consider another idea from Transactional Analysis, organisational script.
Over time, organisations can develop powerful assumptions about themselves, other people, and what is required for survival. These may never be formally articulated, yet they can be remarkably influential.
An organisation may have learned not to challenge authority. Another may have learned that mistakes are dangerous. Another that being busy demonstrates worth. Another that outsiders cannot be trusted. Another that difficult feelings should remain outside the workplace.
Nobody needs to put these messages on the wall. People learn them through experience.
A leader announces that they want people to “speak truth to power”, but becomes defensive when somebody does. The next time a difficult issue arises, there is slightly more hesitation. Someone watches what happened to the colleague who challenged and decides not to take the same risk.
Nothing has been formally decided. Yet something has been learned.
The organisational script is being enacted in the present relational field.
This is one reason I believe the relational field offers something different from simply talking about organisational culture. Culture can help us describe relatively enduring patterns, this is how things are done around here.
The relational field invites us to get closer to the living experience and ask, "What is happening between people, right now, that keeps creating “how things are done around here”?"
If people do not challenge senior leaders, what happens when someone considers doing so? What happens in the body? What happens in the room? What happens in the leader? What happens between colleagues? What happens afterwards?
Suddenly, silence is no longer simply a cultural characteristic. It is something being actively, although often unconsciously, created through relationship.
This perspective also changes how I listen when leaders describe organisational problems.
“My team won't take responsibility.” “They resist change.” “They escalate everything to me.” “They aren't open with me.”
I become curious not only about the team but about the relational pattern surrounding the problem.
A leader frustrated by people continually seeking approval may start making more decisions to speed things up. As the leader makes more decisions, people become less accustomed to making their own. They bring even more decisions to the leader. The leader becomes increasingly frustrated and more directive.
Eventually, the conclusion seems obvious, “Nobody here takes responsibility.”
What if dependency is being co-created in the relational field? That question can be uncomfortable because it implies leaders cannot position themselves entirely outside the organisational dynamics they describe. Neither can coaches, consultants, supervisors, or organisational practitioners.
When I enter an organisational system, I become part of its relational field. I affect what is happening, and what is happening affects me. Sometimes I notice myself becoming unusually cautious. At other times, I may feel an unexpected urge to rescue, take responsibility, work harder, or prove my competence. My first task is not to conclude that the organisation has somehow “made” me feel something. It is to become curious. What belongs to me? What might belong to the interaction between us? Is something familiar being recreated here? Could my experience offer a glimpse of something occurring elsewhere in the system?
Our emotional responses are not facts. But neither should we automatically dismiss them as irrelevant. Used reflectively and ethically, the self can become an instrument of inquiry into the relational field.
Perhaps this is why some organisational change efforts produce less change than expected. We alter the structure but recreate the relationships. We replace the leader but reproduce the same relationship with authority. We introduce new organisational values while the unspoken rules governing everyday encounters remain untouched. A new structure can contain an old dependency. A new team can inherit an old conflict. A stated commitment to psychological safety can exist alongside a relational field in which people have learned that silence is safer.
The visible organisation has changed. The invisible organisation has not. Perhaps that is the part of organisational life we need to become better at noticing.
Organisations have a visible architecture comprising strategies, structures, roles, policies, processes, and reporting relationships. But underneath it sits another architecture, relationships, histories, expectations, loyalties, anxieties, assumptions, power, projections, and the things that everybody somehow knows but nobody quite says aloud.
The relational field is where much of this invisible organisational life comes to life. It is continually moving. Every conversation, silence, appointment, departure, challenge, conflict, and act of leadership can potentially alter it.
And that means the relational field is not only where old organisational patterns are repeated. It is also where something different can begin. When a leader responds differently to challenge, the field changes. When somebody names what everyone has been avoiding, the field changes. When a team becomes curious about its own patterns rather than searching for somebody to blame, the field changes.
Perhaps the most useful question we can bring into organisational life is therefore not simply, “What is wrong?” or even, “Who needs to change?” It may be, "What is happening between us, around us, and within us that we have not yet found words for?"
Because organisations do not exist only in their strategies, structures, or individual people. They are continually being created through relationship. If we want to understand why organisations behave as they do, and how they might genuinely change, we may need to become much more curious about the invisible field we are creating together.
Visit my website for more info!
Read more from Dr. Sandra Wilson
Dr. Sandra Wilson, Business Coach, Mentor, and Consultant
With over 35 years of experience in organisation development, Sandra is a dedicated researcher of human behaviour both at an individual and systemic level. She defines her work as helping people get out of their own way, passionately believing in the untapped potential and limitless resources within every individual. Her mission is to support people in living richer, more fulfilling lives, both professionally and personally. Sandra works internationally as a consultant, teacher, coach, mentor, and supervisor, advocating for rigorous development processes without rigid formulas.
