The psychodynamics of contemporary careers: Anxieties and defenses in deconstructed work

To gain flexibility, organizations increasingly deconstruct jobs, shifting from relatively stable bundles of tasks and titles to dynamic task–project constellations matched to employees’ skills. Yet this redesign also weakens the psychological containment through which jobs have historically stabilized workers’ lived experience of work inside organizations. Drawing on systems psychodynamics, we theorize that as the job’s psychological containment function weakens, workers experience three shared anxieties—about finding their place in shifting configurations of work, having their competence recognized, and forming and maintaining secure work relationships. Workers respond, collectively and often unconsciously, with social defenses: projecting familiar roles and rules onto deconstructed work, splitting off the generalist competence such work demands, and falling back on safe relationships. These defenses provisionally contain anxiety, but they also reorient workers toward familiar ways of organizing, evaluating, and relating that job deconstruction is meant to transform, keeping the redesigned work system in defensive stasis. By reconceptualizing job deconstruction as both a design property of work and a lived condition of shared anxiety, we explain why flexible work redesigns, though fluid in theory, are often frozen in practice, and how organizations can intervene to contain anxiety in new ways as they transition to the new world of work.