PSYCHOLOGICAL LOAD OF MANAGERS AND DESTRUCTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES

The activities of managers require much more energy than the functioning of people who do not manage teams of people and organizations. It generates a specific type of responsibility related to the implementation of four basic management functions - planning, organizing, leading/motivating, controlling (Stoner, Freeman, Gilbert, 1997; Kraczla, 2013) – and an extensive area of decision-making and risk. The cost may take a physiological, psychological and behavioral dimension.

The purpose of the article is to identify adverse conditions and behaviors of persons performing managerial roles that may be related to destructive processes and situations occurring in the organizations and teams they manage. The work is based on psychological theories defining and describing dysfunctional states of managers, often resulting from stress. The transfer of this knowledge to management sciences is an attempt to find the source of most conflicts in organizations and increase the efficiency of their resolution.

Psychological costs incurred by managers can be perceived as the form of somatic ailments, feelings of excessive anxiety (anxiety), emotional balance disorders, workaholism and other forms of addiction, interpersonal conflicts, intensification of narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathological behaviors (a set of features called dark triade in the literature), and as a result to the creation of adverse internal organizational conditions, for instance mobbing. The research on irregularities in the workplace shows a significant increase in negative phenomena associated with the abuse of power. The manifestations of these abuses are the inappropriate treatment of employees by superiors; building an atmosphere that generates stress, verbal violence, humiliation, discrimination, exclusion, and physical violence.

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