Organizational Suffering

Based on Freud’s publication Civilization and Its Discontents, we can compare and deepen the relationship between human beings and their work, where it becomes the main source of their happiness, even with cultural limitations on their performance, this means that the human being must adapt in order to belong to this organization that limits his own being.

With this we can say that an individual and his nature, even being a transforming agent around him, will be limited by the organizational culture in the same way that the citizen is by civilization with his instincts, that when suppressed will lead him for total satisfaction or happiness.

Technically considering this factor, the employee who has intrinsic values ​​that are natural to their existence, to which they can contribute to organizational change, will end up being limited by it, which is strong enough to repel or embrace it for its adaptation to the environment in which he/she operates. The act of suppressing these values ​​and desires will lead to sadness and dissatisfaction, and it is up to the employee before the organization, as well as the citizen before civilization, to find the environment where their desires will be common to what the culture allows them to supply.

The organizational culture as well as the culture of civilization exists to delimit the instincts of the human being, in order to create a common environment of harmony and coexistence, however it does not consider that one of the main sources of happiness is the act of supplying such instincts, which can be manifested in different ways, and it remains for each individual, as well as in civilization, to find the means allowed by culture to be happy, to the point that more and more he/she ceases to be a heterogeneous agent in the environment in order to avoid being repressed by it.

Art: Roy Lichtenstein