Anxiety Containment by Agile Coaches in the Process of Organizational Transformation

The aim of the work is to study the features of containment of anxiety by agile coaches in the process of transformation of the organization. The relevance of the topic is dictated by the active development of information technology, by changes in the lifestyle of people and changes in the business environment, the transfer of a large number of products and services into online. In the work tested the hypothesis that agile coaches contain anxiety in the process of transforming of the organization. The theoretical section examine the ideas of psychoanalysis about groups, about social defenses in organizations, including the idea of groups of basic assumptions, covert coalitions and organizational rituals. The theoretical section was based on the ideas of W. Bion and L. Hirschhorn. As a research method, the free association method was used to identify unconscious, repressed or suppressed drives of group members. Research methods based on the free association method included “16 Associations”, “Cross” and “Metaphor”. The study revealed that the longer agile coaches work in the organization, the more they reassess themselves as a group. The less agile coaches work in an organization, the more critical they are when they see themselves as a group of agile coaches. At the same time, the most profound associations showed the coach's orientation toward people and interaction, combined with a sense of threat from what was happening to them. In the drawings of the coaches, there was a lot of death drive combined with a formal approach to people in the organization. The study revealed that agile coaches really, on the one hand, contain anxiety in the process of transforming organizations, and on the other, they themselves can cease to be a working group, becoming a group in basic assumptions, participating in covert coalitions and organizational rituals.