Events

Prof. Sally Maitlis
Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Leadership
Saïd Business School
University of Oxford

This paper investigates how senior executives with depression and/or anxiety navigate the tensions between a challenging and highly stigmatized mental health condition and the demands and expectations of their professional roles. Based on 41 in-depth interviews, I found that participants engaged in a “protective cycle” of intensive boundary work that maintained social and intrapsychic boundaries around their emotional pain. At the social boundary, executives did boundary work such as always showing up for work and strategizing for obligatory work interactions; this allowed them to function professionally while concealing their emotional pain. The executives also carried out intrapsychic boundary work, much of it unconscious, that included working very hard, using alcohol, and other practices that limited their awareness of their emotional pain. For most participants, this protective cycle was disrupted by a revelatory experience, often involving a panic attack or breakdown, that revealed the limits of their boundary work and triggered a shift in their approach to dealing with their emotional pain. This shift led to a “restorative” cycle in which the executives managed their intrapsychic and social boundaries toward greater permeability, including increasing their understanding of their pain, sharing their emotions with work colleagues, and leading others with greater care and compassion. Using psychodynamic theory to theorize the mechanisms that animate these cycles and the shift between them, this paper offers insights into the little understood experience of leading with a common mental health issue and highlights the importance of attending to unconscious as well as conscious boundary work in organizations.