A qualitative and descriptive research approach was used in this study, following the psychosocial tradition (a cluster of methodologies from a distinct position of researching unconscious communication, dynamics and defences beyond the purely discursive) (Clarke & Hoggett, 2009). Hermeneutic phenomenology was used as the interpretive stance in order to study the lived experiences of professionals in acting capacities as a research phenomenon. The research was grounded in a constructivist, interpretive epistemology based on the assumption that participants’ perceptions and understanding of meaning ascribed to their experiences form their reality (Thorne, 2016). The research was inductive in nature, namely, focussing firstly on the understanding of lived experiences, and then as part of double hermeneutics interpreting the behaviour from the relevant literature (Terre’Blanche, Durrheim, & Painter, 2006).

A collective case study (Wilson & MacLean, 2011) of professionals in one organisation was used. The unit of analysis was the collective group of participants, congruent to the SP assumption that the individual (micro-level) behaves on behalf and as a representation of the group (macro level; Cytrynbaum & Noumair, 2004). This strategy served an intrinsic (towards understanding) and instrumental (providing information to the organisation) purpose (Gergen, Josselson, & Freeman, 2015).

Participants’ conflict manifested on the intrapersonal, interpersonal and intragroup levels. Intrapersonal conflict manifested in being emotionally trapped, as shown in the following statements: ‘I want to resign, but I cannot’ and ‘I feel needed and maybe I am living in a fool’s paradise’.

Interpersonal conflict manifested between the self and family – on the one hand to censor and keep troublesome experiences away from family members (e.g. ‘one carries the burden inside of yourself and just communicate what you think your husband can digest’), and on the other hand to use family members as confidantes (using partners and friends as buffers ‘on a daily basis to offload stress’).

Intragroup conflict manifested in the entire management team where the acting managers became known as ‘the newly promoted group’ who had to ‘earn the respect of others and live up to their level’. The conflict of being accepted by the system or not was internalised, leading to self-doubt and poor self-esteem (‘one has conflicts within oneself and it unconsciously affects the self’). The experience of these conflicts negatively influenced participants’ behaviour towards functioning as good organisational citizens (the struggle to be ‘more committed’, ‘disciplined’, ‘time conscious’ and ‘arriving for meetings first and on time!’). They experienced distance between themselves and their direct reports (who became ‘negative’ and ‘non-cooperative’).

Participants experienced high levels of neurotic anxiety (Newton, Long, & Sievers, 2006). Persecutory anxiety manifested in their experience of being under attack by the system based on the fear of losing the desired object (Curtis, 2015) (e.g. ‘a successful career’, ‘dignity’, ‘competence’, ‘rationality’, ‘identity’ or ‘sanity’). Depressive anxiety followed from their fear of not being good enough for the loved object (the organisation and its authority figures) and the ambivalence in feeling both attachment to and detachment from them (Prior & Glaser, 2006). Although the focus is expressed towards the external (‘what this organisation is doing to me’), it originates from the internal and unconscious wish to aggressively attack the unmanageable destructive forces. Performance anxiety manifested in their sense of not being good enough (‘unqualified’, ‘not having the right personality’) to be permanently appointed. Their high levels of anxiety led to irrational thinking in their attempt to resolve the complex emotions – it felt as if ‘I was losing my hold on life’.

Their defence mechanisms served to protect themselves (Blackman, 2004) from being overwhelmed and humiliated. These were repression (e.g. ‘I never told anyone about how I feel’), reaction formation (‘pretending that all is well’), regression (becoming overly ‘dependent on feedback’ from authority figures), sublimation (of fear and anger with ‘trying to understand’ the organisation’s rationale), denial (an attempt to ‘change the status quo’ and to refuse facing the reality of their position and state of mind) and displacement (of the ‘anger towards the self’ for ‘accepting the acting position’, and projecting this onto the organisation). They became detached from their authentic experiences (Armstrong & Rustin, 2015), which disturbed them greatly – they felt helpless.

Consciously, the participants described their primary task (Cytrynbaum & Noumair, 2004) in a linear and mechanistic manner by focussing on their responsibility and managing their subordinates to reach performance targets. They experienced a ‘stuckness’ (e.g. ‘I have to do as requested and not to question the wishes of my seniors’), helplessness and hopelessness (‘tasks are given – nothing is gonna change for me’).

They denied the pain about their competence not being recognised and fantasised about and idealised ‘being promoted someday’ as recognition of their ‘competence as a manager’.

Participants were mostly clear regarding their normative roles as communicated directly to them or in how they had learnt through experience what the role was supposed to entail.

In their existential role (Newton et al., 2006), they experienced uncertainty, confusion (‘how confusing, totally confusing!’), mostly related to the undefined period of acting, a deep sense of betrayal and shame, all connected to their high level of performance anxiety. This anxiety caused ambiguity. On the one hand, they idealised ‘the senior role’ with its ‘promise of promotion’. On the other hand, they were apprehensive, felt seduced by the system and even ‘punished for not being competent’ and good enough. These experiences reflected their persecutory anxiety as a reflection of their internal loneliness and isolation (Kets De Vries et al., 2007).

In their phenomenal role (Obholzer & Roberts, 1994), they received projections from their superiors and subordinates about not fulfilling the role to the expectation. The data showed evidence of projective identification – how they took in the projections and acted out what others thought of them and their performance.

Various boundaries impacted the participants. Practically, some participants had crossed a geographical boundary by having had to physically relocate, leaving ‘home’ and ‘family’ elsewhere. Their interpersonal boundaries with colleagues, family and friends changed significantly – they were ‘hesitant to share their experiences’ with others in ‘fear of feeling incompetent’ and coming across as ‘troubled by work matters’.

Time boundaries caused survival anxiety in ‘not knowing for how long’ they would stay in the acting capacity.

In terms of role, the greatest issue was the crossing of the boundary from the ‘actual’ to the ‘assumed’ role.

These boundary shifts, crossings and blurring created an almost unbearable motivational anxiety (Steiner & Hall, 2017).

Participants experienced being de-authorised from above and below (Hirschhorn, 1997). They received projections of incompetence, which (through projective identification) they absorbed (Blackman, 2004), thus experiencing self-doubt and performance anxiety. This had a negative impact on their task performance and team contributions. Initially, participants experienced being acknowledged and trusted by the organisation and leadership to take on a more senior position. Later, they realised that leadership was not officially supporting them with performance agreements or discussion about their future roles or careers and generally treated them with disrespect (e.g. ‘as if we were forgotten by the system’). From below, participants experienced being de-authorised by subordinates – they ‘collude against’ ‘acting managers’, ‘withhold important information’, ‘act with disrespect’ and ‘sarcasm’. It was as if they were envious towards what the participants represented (Huffington, Armstrong, Halton, Hoyle, & Pooley, 2004). This resulted in participants’ heightened persecutory anxiety (e.g. ‘as if people are against me’).

Participants’ identities were under attack, which resulted in ‘living in splits’ to the point of feeling fragmented.

As employees, they reported on how they knew where they were coming from (being sure about their past career aspirations and experiences), confused, unstable and insecure in their present acting capacities, and uncertain about their future in the organisation. They referred to an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ organisation, which represents the splits between truth and rationality versus what is irrational and a bad fantasy. This manifested as survival anxiety, followed by defences such as compensation and reaction formation (they became compulsive about detail and structures). Informally, they were not referred to by their professional and organisational titles anymore – instead, they were referred to as ‘acting’ and ‘interim’. It was as if colleagues framed them as without role boundary (job description) or contract. Participants experienced this as being professionally de-authorised, shamed and denigrated, stripped of their professional status. This was also experienced as retraction of recognition from significant authority figures (Lewis, 1971).

Participants showed signs of narcissistic injury or woundedness (Gaitanidis & Curk, 2007), which are evident in the following statements: ‘I have to navigate through a situation and get people to accept that I can offer a better service’ and ‘I had been in management for 16 years. In a snap of fingers my management was taken away’.

This was interpreted as their professional boundaries being under attack, which led to fragmentation beyond the paranoid-schizoid position (White, 2013). As human beings, these experiences negatively influenced their personal lives, as shown in the following statement: ‘You know, I am defined by my work; when you take away my work, you take my life’.

Their confusion manifested in conflict between their real, ideal and denigrated selves. No research could be traced referring to the professional identities of acting staff.

Evidence suggests that this organisation did not function as a competent system (Hodgkinson & Sparrow, 2002) in terms of strategic and knowledge management, cognitive behaviour (rationality and objectivity in decision-making), emotional intelligence and sense making (being emotional attuned) or an internal motivation (locus of control). Furthermore, the organisation showed evidence of managerial mismanagement and toxicity (Allcorn & Stein, 2015; Lubit, 2004), characterised by irrational decision-making, (‘misuse of power’, ‘playing [of] political games’), emotional violence (‘intolerance’, ‘distrust’ and ‘disrespect’) and narcissism (Gaitanidis & Curk, 2007). The organisation’s primary defence mechanism was the splitting of the good from the bad, owning the good (‘want to be seen as competent’) and projecting the bad onto and into (through projective identification – Blackman, 2004) the professionals in acting capacities, who acted out the toxicity in the following behaviours. They experienced psychosomatic symptoms (e.g. ‘choking at night’, ‘I thought I am getting a heart attack’, ‘I had a stroke’ and ‘I feel drugged most of the time’), not being understood (‘what happens in this place does not make sense’), fear (of doing wrong as well as of psychological toxic contamination), distancing (e.g. ‘I started to share less and less’) and paranoia (e.g. ‘the organisation is a political one which treads on power’ and ‘a powerful small group are really in charge of this organisation’). The findings on behaviour in toxic organisations reported by Allcorn and Stein (2015), Goldman (2008) and Lipman-Blumen (2005) revealed some of these symptoms but described in terms of consciously experienced stress.

The professionals’ employment contract was violated in terms of boundaries. The time boundary was not specified, the acting policy was ignored and working conditions were not discussed with incumbents. The task boundary was and stayed unclear, no performance contracts were given and for some no acting allowance was paid. This implied the violation of the psychological contract, where professionals experienced being bullied and ‘not looked after’. This contributed to their unbearable free-floating anxiety (White, 2013). They tried to cope by focussing on the task at hand (as evident in the quotes, ‘do what I can within my area of control and that is where it ends’, ‘anything outside of my area of control I let go off’, ‘in the interest of the organisation and for my own sanity’ and ‘let me just continue to do the work’) whilst also experiencing hopelessness and helplessness (realising that ‘this does not work for me’ and ‘this is making me sick’). This relates to the experienced attack on their professional identities. Previous research on the psychological contract did not study unconscious behaviour (Anderson & Schalk, 1998; Briner & Conway, 2006; Wangithi & Muceke, 2012). Anggraeni et al. (2017) report on how the psychological contract can contain commitment and organisational citizenship from a positive psychology stance. Syed’s (2010) research described the impact of restructuring on the psychological contract, but related to conscious attitudes (without reference to unconscious behaviour).

At the time of this study, South Africa as a contextual macro-system experienced being placed on hold (Basson, 2013). There was a lack of leadership and no indication that anything was being done to resolve problems about service delivery protest actions, salary negotiations and burning national education and health matters. As a subsystem (Kets De Vries et al., 2007), this public service organisation experienced the same frustration, manifesting as a lack of performance and placing managers in acting capacities for indefinite periods of time, as shown in the following statement: ‘This is very weird – the Minister extended my acting capacity indefinitely’.

These professionals referred to ‘being placed on hold’, disconnected from leadership’s awareness. This was interpreted as the professionals in acting capacities experiencing, representing, holding and acting out the larger system’s anxiety, as revealed in the following statements: ‘You are kept in an unstable, uncertain state the whole time’ and ‘No further communication was provided and that was the end of the discussion’.

It was as if the only escape from being ‘on hold’ was to get out (‘the system can use you’ and ‘get rid of you’). A larger systemic interpretation is that the system unconsciously used the ‘acting’ role as a holding space for its collective survival anxiety, with the professionals processing the survival pain (Winnicott, 1965). This view of how individuals contain behaviour on behalf of the organisation is well known in SP (Cytrynbaum & Noumair, 2004), although no research evidence exists on what is contained in acting capacities.

Professionals were ‘handpicked’ for their acting capacities. This act was experienced as something ‘intimate’ and ‘secret’ that made them ‘feel special’. After a while they realised that this was a strong authoritative drive (cold and manipulative), which made them feel betrayed and suspicious, as clearly expresed in the following statements: ‘He lied to me’, and ‘I can deal with that, but allow me to know the truth – communicate with me’.

They experienced being ‘set up’ in a reward–punishment dynamic – success was promised with a demand for loyalty and a threat that betrayal would be punished (e.g. ‘this injustice is wrong, painful’). These experiences left the professionals being hurt and distrusting the system. This was interpreted as organisationally unethical and, in terms of relationships, seductive (Cytrynbaum & Noumair, 2004). This caused injury and paranoia in the system and moreover made these professionals the containers (‘dumping ground’) of systemic ‘injustice’. No other empirical research evidence related to acting roles could be found to confirm this hypothesis.

Professionals were denigrated and belittled. Examples include: In meetings ‘you must explain decisions taken at levels that you have no control over’ and ‘Managing projects totalling R54 million, I got a call from Exco telling me there is no toilet paper and the car park is dirty’.

They became unable to relate to their environment, struggled to make sense of events and experienced confusion, uncertainty and a lack of meaning. In spite of their ‘perseverance’, they ‘felt forced’ (‘although this is not like me’) to let their fear take over (‘no one touches destructive, nasty people’ – ‘they fight back’) leading to the professionals’ withdrawal (with an ‘inability to fight’ and ‘taking a backseat’), whilst staying loyal (‘I continued to give my best’). Although they experienced anger and resentment, they responded with ‘sucking up’ and hoping the situation would pass. Some slept ‘for a good straight 36 h over weekends’. This was interpreted to mean that the professionals’ strong flight response (Cytrynbaum & Noumair, 2004) indicated that they had become victims of systemic bullying, where, through projection, the fear was locked into them to contain and keep silent on behalf of the system. This dynamic resembles the organisational bullying reported by Cilliers (2012) and White (2013).

Professionals were forced to stay in their acting capacities for a long time without any opportunity to be rationally listened to or to process their experiences. They experienced emotional pain, humiliation, devastation, being out of control, high levels of survival and performance anxiety, and illustrated intense defensive behaviour such as denial, introjection and repetition compulsion (Blackman, 2014). It was interpreted that these professionals suffered from emotional trauma, which is echoed by research cited by Curtis (2015).

If industrial and organisational psychologists were not aware of the unconscious systemic dynamics manifesting in organisations, the behaviour of these professionals may have been interpreted (e.g. from an individual psychology perspective) as ‘non-coping’ with demands or stress, followed by a decision about their incompetence and non-promotability to the positions they had been acting in. On the other hand, SP argues that the individual experiences do not only belong to the individuals but also to the whole organisational system. This research illustrated how an organisation experiencing high levels of anxiety during restructuring may project the dark side of the experience onto a group of staff members who then become the containers of systemic toxicity. Furthermore, through study by systems psychodynamically informed industrial and organisational psychologists of the manifesting unconscious behaviour of individuals and its relatedness to the organisation’s dynamics, a richness of psychological data becomes available. These data can be used to coach the employees in acting capacities to self-authorise and to consult with the organisation to become aware of the levels of anxiety and their impact on the total system (Campbell & Groenbaek, 2006).