Psychological aspects in management:

The unconscious mind and your performance

Dr. K. Kuhathasan CEO CENLEAD

Industrial psychology is an area of specialization today. Industrial psychologists have developed methods to boost production, improve working conditions, place applicants in jobs for which they are best suited, train people and reduce industrial accidents.

What do psychologists think about an organisation? What experiments have they done? Psychology is dedicated to answering some of the most interesting questions of everyday life and work. What happens during work? How can bad working habits be broken? Is there a way to measure intelligence?

How does disciplinary procedure affect an officer? Can memory be improved? What causes psychological breakdown? In trying to answer such questions, psychology ties together all that has been discovered about human behaviour and feeling to look at the total human being.

With experience and seniority, managers, continue to acquire information and become more mature to manage well. The ability to comprehend new material and to think flexibly improves with the years. This is particularly true of managers who undergo a continuous professional development program.

If managers live in a stimulating environment and work in an intellectually demanding career they will shine in their profession. One researcher studied more than 700 managers who were engaged in several industries. Although the patterns varied from one profession to another, most of the managers reached their peaks of creativity and productivity in their late career.

Senior Managers

As you become very senior you may act in an interesting way. You may be concerned with the past as well as the future. You may ask: “What have I done with my work? “What have I accomplished? “What do I still wish to accomplish?” In the mid-life transition you may be in a position to assess your accomplishments and determine whether or not they have been satisfying. During this transition, you will develop yet another work structure that will predominate during the period of middle adulthood.

Often a successful mid-life transition is accompanied by a manager becoming a mentor for a young officer. This event signals the attainment, in Erik Erikson’s terms, of generativity. By generativity, Erikson means the desire to use one’s accumulated wisdom to guide future generations.

Structure of personality

Freud viewed personality as a dynamic system directed by three mental structures, the id, the ego and the superego. According to Freud, most behaviour involves activity of all three systems.

Freud was the first modern psychologist to suggest that every personality has a large unconscious component. Life and work includes pleasurable and painful episodes of childhood, which are forgotten or buried in the unconscious.

Although we may not consciously recall these experiences, they continue to influence our behaviour at work. For example, a child who never fully pleases his demanding mother or father may feel unhappy much of the time and will doubt his abilities to succeed and to be loved.

As an adult, the person may suffer from feelings of unworthiness and low self-esteem, despite his very real abilities. Freud believed that unconscious motives and the feelings people experience as children have an enormous impact on adult personality and behaviour, especially at work.

How the Id, Ego and Superego affects managers

By 1923 Freud had described what became known as the structural components of the mind: id, ego, and superego. Though Freud often spoke of them as if they were actual parts of the personality, he introduced and regarded them simply as a model of how the mind works. In other words, the id, ego, and superego do not refer to actual portions of the brain. Instead, they explain how the mind functions and how the instinctual energies are regulated.

In Freud’s theory the id is the reservoir or container of the instinctual urges. It is the lustful or drive-ridden part of the unconscious. The id seeks immediate gratification of desires, regardless of the consequences.

The personalty process that is mostly conscious is called the ego. The ego is the rational, thoughtful, realistic personality process. The superego consists of societal and parental values that have been instilled in the person. It is largely unconscious and restrains the impulses of the id. It represents the person’s moral aspect and is idealistic rather than realistic. The superego, therefore, includes the consciences (knowledge of the behaviour that is correct).

The ego consists of the conscious faculty for perceiving and dealing intelligently with reality. It acts as the mediator between the id (postponing its urges for immediate gratification) and the superego (recognizing that some of its inhibiting forces are irrational). The ego operates on the reality principal and tries to find socially acceptable ways (according to the superego) to gratify the id. In the personality of a well-adjusted person, the ego is the dominant force.

According to Freud, an individual’s personalty is the result of the interaction of these three forces. In some ways, the id represents “want,” the superego “should,” and the ego “can.” Conflict can arise when the three personality structures interact.

Lasting influence

Personality, according to Freud, is the result of the interaction of the ego, superego, and id. The ego operates on the reality principle, which is a conscious awareness of the conflict between the id and the superego. The id contains animal urges, and the superego contains the ethical and moral values of a person’s family and culture.

Our experiences in early childhood, have a lasting influence on our personalities and are often the basis for our adult emotional problems at work.

However, we do not recognize them as the real reasons for much of our adult behaviour.

Freud thought of personality as an iceberg, with only the tip showing above water. The part of personality that we are aware of in everyday work is our conscious mind. This is the tip of the iceberg. Below this is the preconscious mind, which contains information that, we have learned but are not thinking about right now. We can easily pull information in the preconscious mind into the conscious mind by concentrating. Beneath the preconscious level lies the unconscious mind.

Material in the unconscious mind is not readily available to us. Freud suggests that our fears and unpleasant memories are repressed into the unconscious mind.