The Social Psychology of Organizations
Diagnosing Toxicity and Intervening in the Workplace

Healthy and successful organizations require the people who work within them to be happy, resilient and creative. Just as a human body is undermined if it suffers from sickness, so an organization can only function fully if the people who work within it feel engagement and well-being, and any toxic influences which shape or burden their working lives are resolved

This important new title provides a much-needed overview not only of what it means for an organization to be weakened by pervasive psychological influences within the working environment, but also how this dysfunction can be addressed through psychological interventions. The book is split into three core sections:

• Toxicity and Dysfunction in the workplace, outlining structural, behavioural, emotional and cognitive sources of toxicity that undermine organizations
• Principles of the healthy workplace, outlining core concepts of belonging, contribution and meaning from which organizations in turn benefit
• Creating the healthy workplace, outlining a range of approaches to addressing organizational toxicity, including design thinking, positive psychology, and evidence-based approaches.

Written by a practicing organizational psychologist, and including case studies to illustrate how toxicity at the micro level can impact upon wider organizational goals, the book draws on a wide range of literature to provide an accessible, focussed understanding of how the individual psychological experiences of working people can have wider consequences for an organization, and how interventions within that process can address these issues. It is ideal reading for students and researchers of occupational or organizational psychology, organizational behaviour, business and management and HRM.

Acknowledgements. Introduction Part 1: Doing Intelligent Activism: The New Social Psychology of Organizations 1. Knowledge translation for complex workplaces. 2. Understanding Client Engagement Dynamics 3. Ideas of intervention and change in organizations 4. Evidence and intervention methods as tools for practice 5. Ethical issues in practice Part 2: Building an integrated model of organizational toxicity 6. What we know about Organizational Toxicity 7. The macro sources of toxicity in organizations 8. Psychosocial micro-processes that Mitigate or Maximize Toxicity in the Workplace Part 3: Learning from Practice to intervene in toxic organizations 9. Diagnostic themes for examining the psychological environment 10. How current performance management systems make workplaces toxic 11. Re-Designing belonging dynamics for an interconnected world of work 12. Measurement, silence and the mechanisms of compliance Conclusion.

Dr Joanna Wilde has over 25 years’ evidence-based professional practice in Organization Development and Change at senior levels in FTSE 100 and Fortune 100 companies and is an industrial fellow at Aston Business School, UK. She is on the Board of Directors for the UK Council for Work and Health and set up the Work and Health Policy Group for the British Psychology Society. She is also the Director of a small organizational psychology practice.