Harry Levinson - Profiles in Executive Education

Business Horizons, Jan-Feb, 1995 by Harper W. Moulton

"My philosophy of life is reflected in my behavior... and includes a number of significant elements: deep concern about my family; support of humanitarian causes; appreciation of the value of continuous learning; helping other people grow and develop; and believing in fair play and integrity, which is what a teacher is all about, and which is where I started."

--Harty Levinson, Chairman The Levinson Institute

I first met Harry Levinson--researcher, consultant, teacher, leader--at IBM's executive development facility at Sands Point, New York, in the late 1960s, where he had been asked to lead a session of 20 IBM executives on the topic of leadership and stress. Harry was not a dramatic and flamboyant speaker; rather, he was a quiet, thoughtful, and dedicated professional psychologist whose experience, wisdom, and insights made a lasting impression on the executive participants.

However, his many years of experience with IBM, including presentations to top management and consultations with then CEO Tom Watson, Jr., had led to some degree of frustration on Harry's part. He felt that although his relationship with IBM was warm, friendly, and mutually supportive, his ideas had little impact on anything that went on in the company. The reasons for this might be traced to IBM's management style, its years of apparent business success, and some difficulty in accepting new ideas. As with many of the leading corporations of that period, IBM's focus on financial performance incentives may have made it difficult to accept new ways of motivating managers to adopt other methods of rewarding employee development and career growth.

To put all this in perspective, it would be well to identify Dr. Levinson's professional focus on psychoanalytic theory and its application to leadership and management through human behavior and motivation in organizational settings.

RESEARCH

Harry Levinson's professional career in management began in 1954 at The Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, where he spent 14 years creating and developing the Division of Industrial Mental Health. Working with Dr. William C. Menninger, he undertook a project that would keep "well" people functioning well. Initially, Harry spent 18 months reading the literature of management and industrial psychology, traveling the country, and talking to executives, personnel managers, people in occupational medicine, and those few psychiatrists who were working in industry. He discovered that what he and Menninger thought about how to understand and treat people who were mentally ill namely, a comprehensive conception of human personality--was almost totally unknown in management circles. His conclusions from this research were that (a) he had to learn about organizations firsthand, and (b) he had to combine what he knew from psychoanalytic theory and his clinical training with what he found in the literature to fashion a systematic method of working with organizations.

His findings, resulting from hundreds of interviews, were that normal research designs incorporating questionnaires did not lead to an indepth understanding of how people feel about themselves and their experiences. And how people feel has become the core of his clinical approach.

One of the first results of Levinson's research was the concept of a "psychological contract," whereby people unconsciously choose organizations to meet their psychological needs and support their psychological defenses, and organizations in turn choose people who will meet their often unstated needs. When these mutual needs are met, it is called reciprocation. To test this concept, Harry developed the Levinson Reciprocation Scale to measure the degree to which the psychological contract was being fulfilled for employees. If a firm is to be managed well, management must strive to make maximum use of employees' skills, talents, and abilities. If, on the other hand, the firm is managed expediently for short-term gain, its employees tend to be exploited for that gain. This discovery led Harry into studying management per se and leadership in particular.

Further research led Levinson to a deep interest in stress, motivation, and defensive behavior. His particular focus on stress led to elaborating the concept of self-esteem as a product of the gap between the self-image (the mental picture one has of oneself at any given time) and the ego ideal (the mental picture of oneself at one's future best.) The lower the self-esteem, the greater the stress, or feeling of helplessness, resulting in more intense angry pressure on self to attain greater self-esteem. The formula for this is:

The pressure on self to attain greater self-esteem by achievement or mastery can have many positive consequences. Without a high ego ideal, for instance, there would be little wish to achieve. However, there are other consequences as well. If a gap exists between the ego ideal and the self-image, the lower self-esteem can result in hostility; rage can develop toward others or as an attack on self in the form of self-defeat and self-destruction. So the issue of striving toward one's ego ideal in coping with the sense of helplessness has been the core of Harry's professional thinking, his conceptualization of problems in organizations and society, and his consultation.