Organisational Holding Environments: Generative Practice or Sophisticated Defence?

Organisations have never invested more heavily in the language of care. However, anxiety in organisations has intensified. Resilience frameworks, psychological safety programmes, and wellbeing initiatives proliferate across workplaces as an institutional response to peoples’ increasing experience of anxious and destabilising organisational moments.

Drawing on systems psychodynamic theory, and on evidence gathered through doctoral inquiry, this paper examines whether such organisational practices genuinely constitute ‘holding environments’ (Winnicott, 1965). Do such practices offer a reliable, containing presence that enables a person, or a group, to experience anxiety without fragmenting? Or do they function primarily as institutionalised defences against the very anxiety they claim to address? The argument developed here is that, in most cases, they are the latter: sophisticated, well-intentioned, and deeply counterproductive.

The inquiry was conducted over an extended period, using a systems psychodynamic methodology within the Tavistock tradition. The researcher occupied simultaneously the role of organisational insider and the observational and reflexive stance of the researcher. The researcher’s own subjectivity, including their encounter with the very dynamics under study, is treated throughout as a primary instrument of inquiry (Gould, Stapley and Stein, 2006).

Three domains are examined in detail. Resilience, as currently deployed, has been colonised by productivity discourse (Foucault, 1972). Discourse is not just language; it is the system of knowledge and power that determines what can be said, thought, and known. It treats anxiety as a pathogen to be expelled and locates the problem into individuals as their coping skills, their mindset, their capacity to bounce back. All the while, leaving the systemic sources of distress largely untouched.

Psychological safety, once Edmondson’s (1999) precise concept of describing interpersonal risk-taking in teams, may have drifted into something closer to comfort management: an organisational commitment to ensuring that dissent never feels too dangerous. It provides for an organisational commitment that is about neutralising exactly the kind of productive disturbance that genuine learning requires.

Wellbeing programmes complete the picture, externalising the management of anxiety onto individual employees through mindfulness, employee assistance programmes, and self-care frameworks, whilst the institution that generates the anxiety remains structurally protected from examination.

Through a lens of Bion (1962), these practices bear the hallmarks of sophisticated basic assumption activity, particularly dependency and fight-flight, offering the form of containment without its function. The container without its function is a shell: it has the form of holding but not the capacity. The anxiety is managed, not metabolised. Managed anxiety, as Menzies Lyth (1960) demonstrated in her foundational study of nursing, does not diminish: it returns, amplified, elaborating ever more complex defensive arrangements over time.

The sharpest provocation to emerge from this inquiry is that the proliferation of resilience and psychological safety conversation may itself be evidence of mounting systemic anxiety. The defence and the symptom escalate together. The more these frameworks are deployed, the more one might suspect that the underlying turbulence is intensifying rather than being worked through.

From a research participant, the revelation that the shell of containment without systemic change is the cost borne by individuals rather than institutions.

Genuine holding environments, when they appear, tend to grow from real relationships and specific contexts, not from formal programmes or policies. This may be represented by the quality relationship a team that has genuinely worked through a crisis, or a leader capable of tolerating ambiguity long enough for adaptive insight to form (Heifetz, 1994). Such relationships were characterised by what can only be described as relational courage: the willingness to stay present to difficulty without reaching prematurely for reassurance or resolution. They are rarely sponsored at institutional level, because to do so would require organisations to acknowledge what their current practices systematically excluded: that the problem is not solvable by existing means.

That is not a comfortable thought to hold. Which is, of course, exactly the point.