The purpose of the study was to develop a system psychodynamic expose of voluntary turnover by applying the conflict, identity, boundaries, authority, roles and task (CIBART) model to the lived experiences of high achievers.

A qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological research approach allowed a rich description and deep understanding of lived voluntary turnover experiences (Babbie & Mouton, 2001). A triple hermeneutic interpretive stance (Clarke & Hoggett, 2009) was applied, synthesising phenomenological experience with the interpretive activity of both participants and researchers, which, in the context of this study, resulted in a new understanding (Gadamer, 2004) of voluntary turnover. Working with possibility rather than probability, the study is epistemologically rooted in Pierce’s notion of abductive reasoning (Long & Harney, 2013) to construct meaningful interpretations of the phenomenon. Such a hermeneutic and abductive approach is best fitted to studying psychoanalytic phenomena because it ‘regards reality as knowable through different possible understandings that are partially constructed by the knower’ (Mihalits & Codenotti, 2020, p.5). With the systems psychodynamics CIBART frame as a key interpretive lens, the triple hermeneutic process abducted a possible understanding of voluntary turnover as a systemic phenomenon.

The study was based on a qualitative, ideographic, multiple-case study strategy. Free association narrative interviews (FANI) were conducted with seven individual voluntary turnover case studies in a large retail company. The use of rich ideographic information about the cases allowed for new knowledge to emerge (Durrheim, 2006). Multiple cases allowed for cross-case comparison (Carneiro, 2018), benefitting an integrated collective understanding of the phenomenon (Baxter & Jack, 2008).

Conflict manifested interpersonally and intrapersonally. The data especially highlighted the manifest interpersonal conflict between participants and their leaders and how this led to intrapersonal conflict in the self. Participants experienced leaders as blocking their promotion and growth, bullying and undermining their work. C3 relates ‘your ultimate director sort of stifles you a bit … he just shot me down from a dizzy height [leaving me feeling] stifled and ja, bullied in a sense’. This resulted in obvious conflict as C1 describes the relationship as ‘lots of fighting … I shouldn’t be having’. Denoting how the interpersonal conflict with leaders consequently also manifested intrapersonally, C7 describes the conflict-in-the-mind: ‘It placed me in a very difficult position … I was conflicted’ and C2 agrees that ‘It made life quite difficult’. Leaders inappropriately involved participants in conflict among superiors, causing further intrapersonal conflict for participants, as remembered by C7, ‘It was dramatic every single day … I felt uncomfortable … I told her no, don’t put me in the middle and it ended up being a huge thing’. Such interpersonal and related intrapersonal conflict lead participants to experience heightened levels of anxiety, which is evident in C3’s self-reflection, ‘I felt like piggy-in-the-middle’ and in C4’s description of feeling unworthy, disrespected and rejected by the organisational system: ‘I slowly started questioning whether I was good enough … I was out. Done. Disrespectful. Done’.

Anxiety continues to escalate as conflicts also manifest on a group level. C7 describes a group conflict and the detrimental effect thereof on his sense of psychological safety, ‘after the altercation I felt I couldn’t really comment on anything’. The emotions reflected in participants’ references to interpersonal conflict with leaders and within-group conflict denote how the anxiety left participants feeling conflicted, stuck, unworthy and silenced. This led them to unconsciously defend against the anxiety by splitting the bad and good and projecting the bad onto the leaders. C1 compares the screaming, unprofessional behaviour of his leader versus himself ‘doing it professionally obviously … not coming in screaming’. Other participants similarly engage in an us-them narrative, denying the bad in the self and projecting it on leadership in the company, ‘so typical of corporate, a lot of games there and I will tell you exactly what I am thinking, I’m not playing stupid games!’ (C4); and ‘I was trying to maintain his reputation with them. They’re bitching and moaning’ (C2). Participants seem to have been caught in an overwhelming cycle of interpersonal, intrapersonal and in-group conflict, creating anxiety and a plethora of destructive emotions, which they coped with by splitting themselves (as good intentional role players) from their (bad) leaders and the company.

Participants did not identify with their leaders’ ways of being and doing and related examples of leaders behaving incongruently with their personal and professional identities and with the identity of the group. For example, C7 reflected ‘she is very materialistic and that’s how she shapes her life … I can’t identify with her … it’s not the person who I am’. Similarly, C1 vehemently relates his inability to identify with his leader: ‘this isn’t an example of where I’m being overly dramatic … I can’t be that person … I can’t subscribe to that, it’s too hard’. Participants moreover experienced the identity of their work group as coming under attack by their leaders. Emphasising incongruence with the leader who is ‘treating people unfairly’, C2 identifies the workgroup as ‘the fairness police … trust is our commodity’, whereas ‘you [referring to the leader] are now displaying values that don’t connect with me’ (C2). Identity incongruence leads to internal identity conflict and participants risk losing their sense of self, as noted in C4’s words, ‘so these are your leaders, how does that define you as a person?’. Survival anxiety escalates within a team when they struggle to identify with the leader (Cilliers & Koortzen, 2005) and when individuals experience identity conflicts (Petriglieri & Stein, 2012). Such anxiety is defended against using splitting and projection defence dynamics. Participants split themselves and their work group from the leader and project the bad parts onto the leader’s identity and introject into theirs, the good. As such, leaders were described as having no integrity, incompetent and not professional, but as materialistic, underhanded and manipulative. In opposition, participants described themselves as having integrity, competence and professionalism. C3, for example, claimed, ‘I’m quite pragmatic and analytic …my problem solving got me here’, whereas the leader ‘was a superficial sort of on the surface type leader who didn’t have a depth of knowledge’.

Unclear boundaries manifested in role, task and psychological boundaries. In speaking to role and task boundaries one participant said, ‘it does become blurred, but I’m still expected to carry out those duties’ (C5). Psychological boundaries were also experienced to have been violated as noted by C6, ‘after leaving I still know everything that’s going on there’ as well as in C7’s recollection of her superior: ‘she crossed a lot of boundaries and shared a lot of information with me’. Unclear boundaries leave participants feeling vulnerable and exposed, as reiterated by C2, ‘People don’t feel safe … It’s really real. People don’t feel safe’. The unclear task boundaries created performance anxieties as noted in feelings of low self-worth and self-efficacy expressed by C4, ‘slowly I started questioning whether I was good enough, whether or not I have the right skills’. Blurred boundaries left participants feeling unsafe, creating anxiety and participants were left feeling confused, vulnerable and doubting their own competence.

Participants experienced their leaders as disempowered and disempowering. They reported a sense that the leader could not fight for their cause, recalling about a leader: ‘he’s lacking the ballsiness to just say, ‘this is what I believe’ (C1). Another even felt sorry for the disempowered leader saying, ‘I do feel sorry for him because some days he looks like a beaten dog … he wouldn’t push back… he doesn’t have the balls to fight for it’ (C2). Leaders, in turn, disempowered the participants by withholding information, silencing them, excluding them from important meetings and failing to address the issue of unfair and inequitable compensation. C1 summarised this as ‘you don’t have the mandate to do anything’ and C2 recalled the consequent powerlessness she felt, ‘I had reached a state where I thought I was useless’. The experience of being disempowered generated conflict and performance anxiety which led participants to fight, as metaphorically described by C1, ‘we realise there’s a bone now so we’re going to dig, we’re not letting go’ and C6 similarly remembers the consequent conflictual discussions: ‘I wasn’t particularly kind on my comments’. So, to defend against their anxiety, followers first fight the leader and then use me-ness (Lawrence et al., 1996) to withhold power from the leader. The dynamic creates an inescapable double bind that locks both parties into a disempowering dependency.

Leaders were also deauthorised by their leaders, culminating in a top-down cascading and bottom-up mirroring deauthorising dynamic. A participant shared how lines of authority were often bypassed, saying, ‘he dealt directly with me’ (C7). Followers defend against their resulting anxiety by assuming a parent ego state in relation to the leader, causing further deauthorisation and conflict. For example, followers accused leaders of incompetence, as noted by C2 about her leader ‘he’s not a professional expert, he’s nowhere and it’s very sad’ and C3, ‘He was very much unqualified for the position … he’s got no clue’. Deauthorised leaders, in turn, deauthorised their followers. One participant relayed how the leader deauthorised the team expressing distrust in them: ‘I’m going to rather use an external agent because I want this to land well’ (C1). Being deauthorised, left participants feeling inadequate, directionless and frustrated, as reflected in the words of C3, ‘If you’re not been given authority or mandate to go in a certain direction, then it is what it is’. C5 noted his frustration, ‘You’re expected to operate and exercise authority but without the role title’. The participants struggled for authorisation by telling leaders what to do. For example, C1 told her leader: ‘you need to listen because this is what you need to go and tell them’. The summative effect of the disempowering and deauthorising dynamic was a frustrated, angry followership and a defensive leadership manifesting in perpetual leader-follower conflict.

Leaders often lack the ability to effectively manage themselves in their respective roles. As a result, they tend to transfer roles inappropriately and step out of their designated responsibilities. For example, C1 said about his leader that ‘he plays the role of coach because that’s the role he played before’. In C3’s recollection, the leader did not take up his role because he was friends with another senior executive. C3 reflects that ‘[name] could play a stronger role … but I got the feeling that he was too close to the hip with [name]’. C7 noted how her leader failed to mentor her and instead that she had to mentor the leader: ‘I said give me growth, give me learning and development … she [the leader] might be intimidated because I’m the only one who has the voice to call her out when she is wrong’. The anxiety of not being contained by clear role boundaries and the resulting conflict is evident in the previous words of C7, as it demonstrates splitting and projections of badness. Leaders stepping out of roles could not establish clear roles for participants either. This made participants feel used, and that their competence was under attack by the leader. When scrutinised about something which he helped with over and beyond his role, C5 feels misused: ‘I mean you feel like you’re being used’. Similarly, C2 narrated a story of being blamed and scapegoated for a mistake that was not part of her role, she says ‘it gutted me, that was one of the moments that made me decide to leave’. The summative effect of leaders falling out of their role was a followership who were, in turn, forced out of their role and scapegoated in relation to the leader who was out of the role.

Participants experienced leaders as failing to provide clear task boundaries and inhibited followers from performing their tasks. C3 noted: ‘They keep trying to make prioritisations, concessions and ‘let’s focus on this’, but I don’t think they’re tackling it correctly’. Leaders instead overloaded them with tasks and participants experienced becoming stuck and overwhelmed by task complexity and overload: ‘I kept having new initiatives, new projects and it was totally unrealistic to expect execution and delivery’ (C3). This led them to feel inefficient and unproductive, expressed as being very busy yet not achieving goals: ‘It became 3–4 years of going forward without marking off key objectives’ (C3). The lack of progress was attributed to leaders being incapable of understanding the task and not having the ability to give clear definitions to tasks. C2 said about the leadership that ‘In the past our function created safety, security, accountability, ownership. It’s all gone’. In some cases, participants experienced their leaders to have intentionally stifled them from performing their tasks, as emphasised by C1, ‘you’re stifling that person, you’ll not be able to deliver’ resulting in him exclaiming ‘It’s a place to question your sanity’ and for C3 to say:

Leaders acting off-task and followers colluding in anti-task behaviours leave participants without a sense of direction, without meaning and purpose. This causes high levels of survival anxiety, because survival anxiety is related to the fear of not achieving work goals (Edmondson et al., 2004). They then question the reason for their continued existence in the organisation and employ flight as a defence against consuming anxiety.

The findings of this research provide novel insight into the beneath-the-surface systems psychodynamics of voluntary turnover. It contributes to the knowledge field about voluntary turnover by illuminating how dysfunctional systems psychodynamics may lead to voluntary turnover as a complex systemic-driven process. The findings provide evidence of the emotionally laden and unconscious consequences of conflict, emphasising that this needs to be worked through should high achievers be retained. The findings suggest that leaders who do not recognise and work through dysfunctional CIBART dynamics are at greater risk of losing their group members to voluntary turnover. The research also highlights the importance for leaders and groups to provide containment for group members. The findings can be used by consulting psychologists as an analytic guide to explore and understand issues of voluntary turnover manifesting in an organisation. Consulting psychologists can also use these insights to address issues of voluntary turnover by facilitating leaders’ and followers’ insights into possible manifesting CIBART dynamics. Coaching psychologists may make use of the findings and working hypotheses to coach a client through the process of voluntary turnover to better adjust, develop and transform through it.

No prior research into the systems psychodynamics of voluntary turnover exists, making it difficult to compare the study to others. The authors had to make use of their in-depth knowledge of systems psychodynamics and competence as researchers throughout the research. More research into the systems psychodynamics of voluntary turnover is therefore needed. Further qualitative research will be useful to build new knowledge about the unconscious dynamics of voluntary turnover as a systemic phenomenon rather than an individual, rational decision-making act.

The findings were constructed from interviews with a small sample of seven participants and may further be partial to the single organisational study context. The researchers’ predisposition to taking a system psychodynamic stance, additionally subjected the findings to a certain view, albeit unique and underexplored. It may be useful to conduct similar studies in other organisations and industries. The findings are proposed as abductive truths rather than absolute truths and present a novel contribution to voluntary turnover research by putting forth a system psychodynamics explication of its dynamics.