Prepared by
Rayne Dhana MD, MBA
CEO, Rethink Science
I. Introduction
Every person is a consolidation of lived experience. The work of becoming starts in childhood and runs a curving path through milestones, triumphs, and traumas. Our past does not fade. It funnels into every present moment. To live is to build a narrative, and like any narrative, you cannot understand what is without first understanding what was.
Every organization begins the same way. In a person, at a specific moment, under a specific set of pressures. We have treated founding narratives as history. Origin stories for the retreat and the annual report. We do not look at organizations through the developmental lens we use for people. For a person there is what was and what is, and we work to connect them. For an organization we let the two come apart. We do not ask what happens to the origin after the telling. Where it goes. What it does to the people who arrive after.
This paper proposes a framework that treats organizations as having both their own psychodevelopment and a psychodevelopmental influence on their members. The founder, or founding team, is the parent of the organization. They provide its means of survival and safeguard its wellbeing until it can sustain itself. The founding context, like childhood, is developmentally rich. By that I mean a period whose experiences leave a lasting imprint on how a system grows and relates to the world. During this period, the founder’s psychology generates psychological structures that are encoded in the organization’s culture, narrative, and operations. Those structures transmit forward across every generation of membership that follows.
The member who joins decades after founding inherits something from it. A set of relational expectations. A characteristic way of managing difficulty. An orientation toward authority and belonging. These inheritances are compulsory and unconscious. The member does not choose to receive them and usually has no idea they are running. That member is the latest carrier of a psychology that began before them and will continue after them. This transmission, compulsory and largely invisible, is what Organizational Psychogenetics (OPG) sets out to understand.
Organizational Psychogenetics (OPG) is the study of the psychological origins of organizational structures. How founding conditions generate organizational psychology. How that psychology is transmitted and inherited across generations of membership.
How it shapes the developmental experience of the people the organization produces.
I make three claims:
- Organizations have a psychology encoded from founding conditions. An organization does not simply reflect the psychology of the people currently in it. It carries a psychology encoded at founding, before most of its current members arrived, and that psychology persists regardless of who leads the organization or how many strategic reinventions it survives.
- Organizational psychology is transmitted and inherited by its members. That psychology does not live in a document or a set of stated values. It travels through people. Each new generation inherits it, enacts it, and passes it forward, most of them without knowing they are doing it.
- Organizational psychology shapes adult development. Organizations are the primary relational environment of adult life, so this inheritance has developmental consequences. The organization does not just shape careers. It shapes the psychological architecture of the people who move through it, often in ways that outlast the job.
The language is drawn deliberately from genetics. The genotype is the inherited code an organism carries regardless of how it looks or behaves. The phenotype is the visible expression of that code as it meets the environment. Identical twins carry the same genotype; the way each one develops in response to their own life is the phenotype. I propose the same distinction for organizations. The founding psychology of an organization is its genotype: the inherited psychological information encoded at founding that persists across generations of membership. The observable structures, behaviors, and relational patterns it produces are its phenotype. And just as phenotypic change leaves the genotype untouched, behavioral and structural intervention that never reaches the founding psychology leaves the organizational genotype intact.
This field draws on adjacent traditions. Industrial and organizational psychology, systems psychodynamics, developmental psychology, psychoanalytic theory, public health. It is not contained by any of them. Where those traditions ask what happens to people inside organizations, or between groups inside them, OPG asks what psychological structures the organization itself carries, where they come from, and what they produce in the people who pass through.
II. The Gap in the Existing Literature
There is a question at the center of organizational life, and the literature has circled it for decades. What is the psychology of the organization itself, where does it come from, and what does it produce? The pieces of the answer are scattered across disciplines, written in different vocabularies, published decades apart.
Industrial-organizational psychology has built a rigorous body of knowledge about how people behave inside organizations, how groups function, how structure shapes performance. It lets us understand the impact of organizational identity on individual performance, the merits and costs of transactional versus transformational leadership, the interplay of affect and cognition in job satisfaction, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, and much more (Ones, Viswesvaran, & Anderson, 2017). However, possibly due to the need to create application from theory, this rigorous body of knowledge focuses at the level of the individual, where it is much easier to produce measurable interventions aimed at optimizing human performance and efficiency in the here and now. The organization’s psychology, instead of being the object of study, becomes a byproduct of it.
Selznick saw it first: that the organization has a psychology of its own, a self distinct from the people in it. He argued that an organization begins as a technical instrument, expendable, built to do a job, and then it acquires a self. Through what he called infusion with value it becomes an institution people defend for its own sake, past the point the task alone would justify (Selznick, 1957). He described the organization’s self in the language of character: historical, integrated, functional, dynamic. He even reached for the psychoanalytic idea of character as a defense against anxiety. Organizational theory arrived, in 1957, at the same anxiety and defense the psychodynamic tradition would run through Menzies Lyth in 1960, and Hirschhorn decades after. Selznick took the field as far as the self. Where that self comes from, and whose it is, was the question his account opened and handed forward.
Although he did not theorize selfhood, Schein came closest to a mechanism for how that self gets set. He identified how leaders embed culture: what they pay attention to, how they respond to crises, how they allocate resources, whom they hire and promote
(Schein, 2010). The mechanisms are real, and they are where most change efforts still concentrate. They show how a culture expresses itself and raise the question of what generates the behavior in the first place. Kets de Vries and Miller followed that question toward the source, showing that the psychological makeup of founders and senior leaders produces recognizable, self-perpetuating organizational pathologies that no behavioral fix reaches (Kets de Vries & Miller, 1984). The founding material runs beneath Schein’s mechanisms and gives them their shape. He mapped the phenotype. The genotype layer that generates it stayed undefined.
This is why so much change fails. If you treat the surface as the source, the surface is where you intervene. Most change initiatives do not produce durable results (Kotter, 1995; Beer, Eisenstat, & Spector, 1990). They were aimed at the wrong layer. A leader who changes what they visibly attend to, without touching the founding material that shapes their attention, watches the organization quietly reorganize itself around the original pattern.
The tradition that saw that original pattern most clearly was systems psychodynamics. It descends from Bion, who studied groups at the Tavistock Institute and held that every group is at once pursuing its task and unconsciously avoiding it, a work group and a basic assumption group present at the same time (Bion, 1961). Menzies Lyth took the idea into a hospital. Her 1960 study of a nursing service found a set of institutional defenses, work split into rigid task lists, patients handled impersonally, procedures run as rituals, responsibility diffused, all of it built to hold off the anxiety the work produced (Menzies Lyth, 1960). The defenses belonged to no one in particular. They had accumulated across many cohorts and hardened into something a new nurse met as simply the way things are done, a way of handling distress assembled by nurses she would never meet. These were cumulative historical formations, and once inherited they shaped, and often overrode, the people carrying them. The psychology was larger than everyone in the building at any one moment, though where it began, and what set it at the start, sat just past the edge of its frame.
Founder psychology → Organization psychological structures → Inheritance by members → Member/group dynamics
One tradition did go back to the founding. Organizational ecology, beginning with Stinchcombe, established the liability of newness and then something more useful here: that the conditions present at founding leave a lasting mark on an organization’s form and its odds of survival (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013; Stinchcombe, 1965; Yang & Aldrich, 2017). New organizations struggle with the same things, managing strangers, assembling resources quickly, surviving a hard environment, and how they solve those problems at the start tends to stay solved that way. Ecology evaluated that imprint where it could be counted, in structure and resources, on the survivable shape of the firm. It proved that founding persists. What it did not explore is the relational and psychodevelopmental influence underneath that structure.
Stapley went furthest in giving the organization a self to study. He argued that an organization has a personality, formed early and held in place by the same unconscious processes that shape a person’s, and that what we call culture is that personality showing on the surface (Stapley, 1996). He was right, and this framework owes him the core intuition. He gave the field a personality. What a personality implies, this framework investigates: where it comes from, how it travels, who it shapes.
While imprinting theory traces how a founder’s blueprints, the principles and rules they deliberately install and transmit, persist as organizational features (Becker, 2025), Organizational Psychogenetics traces the compulsory and unconscious inheritances from the founder that are then reproduced across generations of members through the organization’s defenses rather than through pedagogy or intentional design.
Look over the literature landscape and the picture is scattered. Selznick saw the character. The psychodynamic tradition saw the inherited defenses. Ecology proved founding persists. Stapley identified the personality. Each described a portion of the whole, in different decades, in different vocabularies, the findings credible and unconnected. What is missing on the path to durable change is the assembly: an account of the organization as a psychological entity with a developmental history, one that begins in specific psychological conditions, carries them forward through specific mechanisms, and produces specific developmental consequences in the people it holds. Treating it as one thing, with borders, turns a scattered intuition into something a field can study. Form it into a single subject, and you reach the layer underneath, the one that generates the pattern. That is the layer change efforts never touch, which is why they fail. Work it directly, and lasting change becomes possible for the first time.
III. Organizations Have a Psychology that is Encoded From Founding Conditions
Founding is not a single moment. It is the culmination of a series of them, defined by three pre-founding activities: the creation of the abstract concept in the founders’ minds, the formation of the founding team, and the distillation of the abstract into a first offering meant to be experienced by a potential consumer. Each of these produces conditions in the founder that culminate in the psychological event marking the inception of the organization’s psychology.
Teasing apart the founding and pre-founding stages matters. An organization does not arrive suddenly, a neutral structure waiting to be populated with purpose and culture. It arrives already shaped by the founder’s internal organization, by the conditions under which the founding occurs, by what the founding generation needed the organization to do for them psychologically, and by what they could not yet see about themselves. These exposures happen during the uncertain, energetic pre-founding stages, and are then projected onto the organization at founding.
It is worth addressing a plausible alternative first. Structures that concentrate information, resist delegation, or produce rigid hierarchy may reflect founding conditions as opposed to founder psychology: competitive pressure, resource constraint, regulatory environment. A founder under severe scarcity may build information-concentrating structures for strategic reasons, and those structures may persist simply because they once worked. The persistence doesn’t need to express any enduring psychological template.
I do not dismiss this. Founding conditions and founder psychology are not independent variables. They interact, and disentangling their contributions to organizational character is one of the central empirical challenges the field faces. What I argue is narrower. Founding conditions cannot fully account for the specificity, the persistence, or the affective charge of the patterns we observe. Two organizations founded under materially identical conditions, by founders with different psychologies, produce different relational climates, different responses to threat, different developmental consequences for their members. The material conditions explain why the structure took the shape it did. They do not explain the characteristic anxiety, the relational temperature, or the particular way the organization meets a threat. Those are the qualities the framework has to account for.
The founder’s internal organization is the primary generative mechanism. This is not a new intuition. Benjamin Schneider, addressing IO, argued that the goals at the hub of any organization emerge from the founder, and that, other things equal, it is the founder’s personality that determines its structure and strategy (Schneider, 1987). I take that as the floor and go a layer deeper. The founder is not only the person who had the idea and gathered the resources, and not only a personality and a set of goals. They are the person whose characteristic way of relating to authority, to uncertainty, to difference, to failure, and to recognition becomes encoded in the founding structures before anyone else is present to offer an alternative. Every early decision is a behavioral expression of the founder’s psychology. Who gets to speak in which rooms. What counts as performance. How closeness and distance are managed in the leadership relationship. These decisions accumulate and harden into culture before anyone can examine them as choices. By the time the organization is large enough to have a perspective on its own culture, the choices have become the natural order.
None of this would matter if the imprint faded. The strongest evidence that it does not comes from the firms themselves. Baron, Burton, and Hannan followed a hundred young technology companies through their first decade and found that every founder arrived with a blueprint for the employment relationship already in hand. A set of assumptions about how people would be bound to the work, how they would be controlled, how they would be chosen (Baron, Burton, & Hannan, 1996). The blueprint was not a mood or a slogan. It predicted which practices the company adopted and how fast, controlling for size and industry, years after the founder first held it.
Here is the result that matters most. The founder’s original model predicted the company’s practices in 1994 better than the model the sitting CEO held in 1994. The person in the chair had changed. The pattern had not. The founding logic outlived the founder and outweighed the leadership of the moment.
A second finding illustrates the mechanism more closely. Where a company was built with family or long-standing friends, five in six adopted a commitment model of employment, against fewer than three in ten across the full sample. Founders who built among intimates built intimate structures. They imported the relational world they already knew and encoded it into the organization.
When these firms tried to move the model, the change surfaced as dissent, turnover, and legal exposure. Moving the pattern was expensive. The system reorganized around what it had been.
Boeker found the same persistence on a different layer. Studying fifty-one semiconductor firms, he compared each one’s strategy at founding with its strategy years later. The founding approach held when it had been dominant from the start, when influence inside the firm was built around it, and when the founders still held ownership. It moved only under poor performance, age, the founder’s departure, or outside ownership (Boeker, 1989). Baron measured persistence in the employment relationship. Boeker measured it in strategy. The imprint sits in two different layers of the organization and holds in both. Boeker borrows Kimberly’s image to say why: the conditions under which an organization is born, and the course of its infancy, have lasting consequences for its later life (Kimberly, 1979, as cited in Boeker, 1989).
This is the framework’s central claim translated through empiric measurement. Baron and Boeker were looking at the phenotype. The espoused employment system, the strategic posture. The layer the framework says is visible from outside. They found it imprints at founding and holds through leadership change and market change, which is what an organizational genotype produces. They did not go beneath the surface to the psychology that generates the pattern, because that was not their question. The framework picks up exactly where their assessment stops.
The founder’s psychology encodes itself through distinct pathways.
Relational schemas. Baldwin’s work established that people carry cognitive structures for how specific relationships function, structures that activate automatically and shape perception and behavior in relational contexts without conscious awareness (Baldwin, 1992). The decisions made during founding encode these schemas at the structural level, reflecting the founder’s psychological needs as much as any strategic logic. Who reports to whom, how decisions get made, what information flows where. None of it is neutral. It is the founder’s inner world made into structure.
Consider two founders. Both building technology companies the same year with comparable resources. One builds a flat, voice-forward structure because she came up where hierarchy was wielded punitively. The other builds a tight command structure because he spent years in chaos and learned that control was survival. The companies will feel different in ways no org chart fully explains. A founder with deep sensitivity to authority builds flat structures that make hierarchy invisible. A founder organized around control builds structures that keep information concentrated at the top. A founder who cannot tolerate ambiguity builds process-heavy systems that remove the need for judgment lower down, because judgment feels too unpredictable and too dangerous to leave in other people’s hands.
These choices outlast the founder because they get treated as operational design instead of what they are. Phenotypic expressions of an organizational genotype that precedes and outlasts any individual member.
Narrative inheritance. Bruner argued that narrative is the primary cognitive mode through which humans organize experience and carry meaning across time, and that the stories people tell about themselves shape what they can perceive and do (Bruner, 1990). The founding narrative works the same way, but at the organizational level and across generations. It is more than a record. It becomes an operating document. It tells people what kind of place this is, what is expected of them, how things work here. Organizations carry their founding stories across generations of membership, and those stories carry the psychological content of the conditions the organization was born into.
Walsh and Ungson called it organizational memory, the store of an organization’s past held not in any single place but across its people, its culture and stories, its routines, its roles, and even its physical layout, and brought to bear on present decisions (Walsh & Ungson, 1991). Most of that retrieval is automatic. The past encoded in a procedure or a role is pulled into present behavior effortlessly, before anyone asks whether it still fits. Levitt and March described the same persistence from the side of learning: organizations encode the lessons of their history into routines that run independently of the people who carry them out and survive heavy turnover, passed to members who never lived the history that produced them (Levitt & March, 1988). The story is one carrier. The routine, the role, and the room are others, and they hold the response long after the reason for it has worn away.
A startup that survived on almost nothing in its first two years may keep resisting spending long after it has raised real money, because the scarcity story outlasted the scarcity. The anxiety of not having enough becomes part of the culture’s grammar, shaping decisions and expectations long after the conditions that produced it are gone. An organization founded by a charismatic visionary keeps organizing its expectations around the ghost of that authority, decades after the founder has left. New leaders are compared against an absent standard. Authority is felt through the template the founder left behind. The founding narrative is, in this sense, one of the primary carriers of the organizational genotype across generations of membership.
Defensive reproduction. Hirschhorn extended Menzies Lyth’s observation to examine how organizational anxiety becomes structurally embedded and self-reproducing, carried forward through role relationships and institutional arrangements that persist across changes in personnel (Hirschhorn, 1988). Social defenses in organizations exist independently of the people who work within them in exactly this sense. They are embedded in structures, policies, and cultural norms, and they work to reinforce individuals’ own defenses against the anxieties organizational life produces.
The defenses that form during founding, organized around the anxiety of uncertain resources or contested legitimacy, become institutionalized over time. What began as an adaptive response to a specific threat hardens into structure. It stops being a defense against something and becomes simply the way things are done here. New members absorb it as culture and enact it without knowing where it came from or what it once protected against.
Relational schema confirmation. Hazan and Shaver established that the attachment schemas people form in early relationships extend into adult relational contexts, including the workplace, where they shape how people orient toward authority figures and manage proximity and distance in professional relationships (Hazan & Shaver, 1990). Organizations develop characteristic ways of relating to authority, to difference, to vulnerability, and to conflict, and these interact with members’ schemas in ways that are not incidental. They function as relational schemas. Shared, unspoken rules about how people are expected to show up and relate to one another. And they do not exist in isolation. They meet the relational schemas individual members bring with them from earlier in life, especially from childhood.
The organization that punishes visibility confirms the relational schema of the person who learned early that being seen was dangerous. The organization that rewards certainty and treats doubt as weakness confirms the relational schema of the person who came to believe uncertainty was shameful. In each case, the organizational culture and the individual’s developmental history reinforce what was already there.
This match has consequences for member longevity. Organizations attract and keep people whose schemas fit the culture, and they lose, push out, or never hire the people whose schemas conflict with it. This is the attraction, selection, and attrition Schneider described, the cycle by which an organization becomes more homogeneous in its people than chance would predict (Schneider, 1987). Schneider explained that homogeneity through sorting. Who is drawn in, who is chosen, who leaves. I am proposing something the sorting account does not reach. The organization does not only gather people who already fit. Over time it works on the people who did not, and its psychological character deepens and becomes self-selecting. Whether this selection produces genuine developmental change or simply concentrates compatible schemas is among the most generative questions the field will need to pursue.
Founding psychology → Organization psychological structures→ Characteristic relational climate → selects and confirms specific relational schemas in its membership
IV. Organizational Psychology Is Transmitted and Inherited By Its Members
This is how it outlives the people who put it there. Every organization carries the unprocessed psychological material of its founder, the accumulated emotions, conflicts, and tensions that were never openly examined or worked through. In a person we would call it unresolved trauma. In an organization it shows up as patterns that persist long after any practical reason for them is gone. Instead of being faced directly, these buried dynamics get displaced onto convenient targets, which lets the system avoid looking at its own underlying issues. What is remarkable is how durable the inheritance proves.
Organizations outlast their founders, survive successive waves of leadership, and weather major strategic reinventions, and still hold a recognizable psychological character throughout. The force that ensures it is the organization’s defensive system. The primary mechanism of continuity and the primary obstacle to genuine change.
The idea that a psychology passes down a line of people who never chose it is not entirely new. It is the core of Bowen’s family systems theory. Murray Bowen described a multigenerational transmission process in which a family’s level of emotional maturity, its anxiety, and its characteristic ways of managing closeness and distance are handed down across generations through the relationships themselves (Kerr & Bowen, 1988). The family is the unit, not the individual, and the patterns outlive the people who started them. An organization inherits the same way. The founding family is just larger, and its descendants are hired instead of born.
Before this mechanism was identified, there is a more basic channel. The inherited psychology moves from person to person mostly below awareness, the way a mood does. Hatfield and colleagues established that people automatically catch one another’s emotions, synchronizing without deciding to (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993). Barsade put it to the test in a work group and watched one person’s affect spread and reorganize how the group cooperated, argued, and performed, while the people who caught it could not say why (Barsade, 2002). Members are, in her phrase, walking mood inductors. This is the founding climate reproduced in miniature, the inheritance crossing from one person to the next without anyone choosing to pass it on. The channel itself is neutral. It carries a steady, holding climate as faithfully as an anxious one, which is why the same mechanism that transmits a wound can transmit its repair.
This psychology is transmitted and inherited through the following mechanisms.
The identified patient. Minuchin’s work in structural family therapy introduced the identified patient to describe how family systems locate systemic dysfunction in a single member, who is then treated as the source of the family’s difficulty (Minuchin, 1974). Organizational psychology runs the same mechanism at a larger scale. It singles out a scapegoat. An individual, a team, a group, who ends up carrying the weight of tensions and dysfunction the organization as a whole has never properly confronted or resolved. This entity is experienced as the source of the organization’s difficulties, and while it is often held up as the idealized solution, removing it usually produces a new identified patient instead of resolution.
The identified patient is one of the most reliable signs that unprocessed material is moving through the organization. The attribution of fault, and the reaction to the identified patient, is grossly out of proportion to anything that can reasonably be laid at the entity’s feet.
Beyond misappropriating the cognitive resources needed to address the core dysfunction, the identified patient sends a clear signal to new members about what is valued and what will not be tolerated. Through social learning, this shapes individual behavior and quietly trains the whole organization toward cosmetic, misdirected problem solving instead of genuine engagement with the underlying issue.
We see it most clearly in organizations that launch change initiatives aimed at a specific person, team, or group, only to find that once the target is removed or remediated, a new problem entity appears. A company that has cycled through three heads of sales in two years, each one eventually blamed for the same problems, is almost certainly producing an identified patient not identifying a real one.
Leadership succession pathology. Sonnenfeld’s empirical research on CEO succession documented the psychological intensity of leadership departure and the patterns by which organizations reproduce specific leader types across generations, finding that the organization’s tolerance for certain kinds of leadership is a more reliable determinant of succession outcomes than the successor’s individual capacities (Sonnenfeld, 1988). Sonnenfeld captured one half of the picture, and the rest of the field has filled in the same half. A decade of succession research, reviewed across more than sixty studies, established the antecedents and the consequences with some confidence: poor performance tends to precede a change at the top, outsiders arrive when a board wants a turn, and a successor needs years before performance moves at all (Giambatista, Rowe, & Riaz, 2005). What it did not produce, by its own reviewers’ admission, is the why. They call mechanism the hardest question in the literature and the one it has most consistently stepped around. Organizations carrying unprocessed founding psychology often struggle profoundly with succession, for a reason Sonnenfeld’s typology describes but does not account for: the founding material determines what the organization can tolerate in a leader. That material does not sit in a file waiting to be dealt with. It lives inside the leadership relationship itself. In how leaders behave under pressure. In who gets rewarded and who gets pushed out. In the topics that are somehow never quite addressed. When a leader departs, the successor inherits not just a title and a set of responsibilities but the entire defensive structure that has grown up around the role. The transition stirs up all the anxiety that structure was designed to keep at bay.
This tends to produce one of two outcomes. The first is that succession becomes impossible. Founders who cannot bring themselves to leave, or successors who cannot survive the psychological pressure the role places on them. The second is repetition. The successor reproduces the founder’s psychology, not through conscious imitation, but because the organizational culture can only tolerate a certain kind of leader. Those who do not fit are either gradually shaped by the organization until they do, or they are expelled.
The pattern is most legible in organizations that welcomed a new leader as the agent of genuine transformation, then watched that leader gradually narrow their range of action until it fit the shape of everything that came before.
The foreclosed territory. Argyris and Schön identified a class of organizational phenomena they called undiscussables. Subjects members collectively avoid raising because doing so would expose contradictions the organization’s defensive structure cannot tolerate, and whose undiscussability is itself undiscussable (Argyris & Schön, 1978). Every organization carrying unprocessed founding material develops these areas, and OPG locates their source in the founding psychological material. These are the subjects, histories, or practices that draw a reaction completely out of proportion to what is actually at stake. Someone asks a reasonable question and the room goes cold. A topic comes up in a meeting and the conversation is immediately redirected. A long- standing practice is gently questioned and the response is swift and surprisingly intense.
What is happening in those moments is not really about the question or the topic. The surface reaction is the visible edge of a much deeper defensive structure, one quietly organized around something the organization has never been able to come to terms with. The things an organization cannot examine, and the force with which it polices that boundary, are among the most useful things you can observe about it. They tell you not just what is being protected, but how much of the organization’s energy is going into the protection.
We see this when a new hire notices that a particular project, one that failed years before they arrived, is never mentioned. They bring it up once, innocently, as context for a current decision. The meeting does not recover. Later someone takes them aside and explains, carefully and with evident goodwill, that they were probably right on the merits, but that raising it the way they did puts important relationships at risk. The feedback is framed as professional advice. It is an initiation into the organization’s unspoken rules about what cannot be examined and what it costs to try.
Narrative gaps. The psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan spent decades inside conflicts that had outlived the people who started them, and he documented how a group carries a wound across generations who were never there for the original injury. He called the shared version a chosen trauma, a mythologized loss that binds a group’s identity even as it bends the facts (Volkan, 2001). The mechanism beneath it is the part that matters here. Volkan describes a deposited image, an already formed image passed into the developing self of the next generation to be held until the conflict it carries can be resolved, and he calls that deposited image a psychological gene (Volkan, 2001). A field built on refugees and replacement children arrived, on its own, at the word this framework reaches for. What gets transmitted is not the event. It is the image of the event, placed into someone who never lived it, shaping what they feel compelled to do. And it travels most reliably through what is never said, the wound carried forward precisely because no one will address it directly. Zerubavel’s work on collective social silence extends this beyond the psychoanalytic tradition, documenting how groups sustain collective denial of difficult truths across generations through the quiet enforcement of what stays unsaid (Zerubavel, 2006).
David Boje went looking for this inside a single firm and caught it happening. Across eight months in a company that had burned through five chief executives in two years, he found that people rarely told its stories whole, and that the most loaded ones were the most abbreviated. A single phrase, you know the story, stood in for the whole account, the rest left for insiders to fill (Boje, 1991). The gap was not a hole in the record. It was the record, working as intended. The terser the telling, the more completely the listeners already shared what went unsaid, and the more surely it shut out anyone who did not. A founding wound travels the same way, defined once and then never again, understood by everyone and spoken by no one.
What an organization’s official history leaves out is just as telling as what it includes. Organizations that carry unprocessed founding wounds, moments of harm, betrayal, or failure that were never fully addressed, tend to develop founding narratives with notable gaps. The story is told with confidence up to a point, and then it goes vague, or jumps forward, or quietly changes the subject. The gaps are not accidental. They carry the weight of what cannot be said, because the organization’s defensive structure requires the omission.
The gaps are diagnostically useful. Where the story goes thin, or where the official account actively contradicts what people privately know to be true, is often exactly where the founding wound sits.
We see this in organizations whose history includes participation in harmful or controversial events. Their public-facing materials foreground founding accomplishments and moments of pride, and leave the more difficult chapters unacknowledged or reduced to a single sanitized sentence.
These transmission mechanisms work much like epigenetic expression in biology. The organizational genotype does not disappear under changing conditions. It lies dormant until the conditions it needs for expression are present. When the organization is under pressure, when leadership succession becomes contested, when an external event touches the original founding wound, the genotype asserts itself. What looks like a new crisis is often an old one, finally finding the conditions it needed to surface.
V. Organizational Psychology Shapes Adult Development
For most adults in post-industrial societies, the workplace is the primary relational environment for the majority of waking hours across the majority of adult life. We spend more time there than in any other relational context. Full-time workers spend around eight hours working on the days they work, more of the waking day than they give to anyone else (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024). The study of adult development as its own psychological domain begins with Erikson, who argued that identity formation does not conclude at adolescence but continues through a series of psychosocial stages across the lifespan, each organized around a generative tension (Erikson, 1950). That adults remain developmentally in motion is the premise this section rests on.
If relational environments shape psychological development, and the evidence that they do is overwhelming, then the workplace is shaping adult psychological development at a scale and duration rivaled only by the family of origin. Levinson and colleagues established that adult life proceeds through recognizable developmental seasons, each organized around distinct psychological tasks and relational challenges, and that the environments adults inhabit during those seasons are part of what forms them (Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, & McKee, 1978).
The longitudinal data supports this. Vaillant’s decades-long follow-up of the Grant Study cohort showed that the quality of a person’s relational environment in adulthood predicted developmental trajectory more reliably than childhood variables alone (Vaillant, 1977). The organization, as the primary relational environment of adult working life, is therefore not incidental to development. It is one of its principal sites.
Bowlby established that the early relationship with a caregiver creates internal working models, schemas for how relationships function, that persist into adulthood and serve as a template for future relationships (Bowlby, 1969). Early attachment theory focused on parental relationships, but the drive to form attachment bonds does not end in childhood. It extends into adult relational contexts, including, significantly, the workplace (Harms, 2011; Hazan & Shaver, 1990).
The organization’s relational climate either confirms or disrupts these working models. An anxious, hypervigilant climate confirms the schemas of people who grew up in environments that made them hypervigilant, and gradually produces hypervigilance in people who did not start there. An authoritarian authority structure confirms the schemas of people whose early relationships taught them that authority is punitive and that compliance is the only safe response. A culture that makes vulnerability dangerous confirms that vulnerability is indeed dangerous, and trains the people inside it to manage their experiences instead of have them.
Organizations do not intend to parent their adult members. But the relational conditions they create, the quality of authority relationships, the tolerance for vulnerability, the management of belonging and exclusion, the response to failure, perform parenting functions whether the organization acknowledges it or not. No one designs an onboarding process with the goal of reactivating a new hire’s childhood relationship to authority. Intention is not required for impact.
I call this occupational reparenting.
It is the process by which organizational membership reactivates the relational schemas a person formed earlier in life and then confirms them, disrupts them, or quietly deepens them. The person who learned that authority is dangerous will meet authority again here. The person who learned that visibility invites punishment will be seen here. The organization is not neutral to what they bring. It responds. And that response has consequences well beyond the workday.
When I say organizational membership shapes adult development, I mean something specific. The primary dimensions of developmental consequence are attachment style, the internal working models through which people organize relational experience (Bowlby, 1969; Harms, 2011); reflective functioning, the capacity to understand behavior in terms of underlying mental states (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002); and psychological flexibility, the capacity to hold difficult experience without narrowing one’s behavioral range in response (Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010). Kegan’s subject-object theory offers a parallel frame, describing development as the growing capacity to take as object what was previously experienced as subject, to see one’s own assumptions (Kegan, 1982). These are the dimensions along which organizational membership is proposed to produce measurable developmental change, and they are the theoretical core of what a research program in this field would need to assess.
Winnicott’s concept of the holding environment is directly relevant (Winnicott, 1960). A holding environment is the way a caregiver creates conditions safe and stable enough for a child to tolerate distress, take risks, and grow. William Kahn took that idea out of the nursery and into the workplace, defining a holding environment at work as a relationship that lets an otherwise capable adult manage anxiety that would otherwise disable them. He explained what holding is made of: containment, receiving someone’s distress without flinching; empathic acknowledgment, validating the experience; and enabling perspective, helping them make sense of it and find their way back to the work (Kahn, 2001). He identified the ways it fails too: holders who intrude or abandon, dependence that curdles into codependence, peers who collude to keep a dysfunction unexamined. Organizations provide holding environments for their adult members in exactly this structural sense. When the holding is good, the organization can tolerate vulnerability without punishing it, can acknowledge failure without locating it in an identified patient, and can hold difference without requiring conformity. Under those conditions, adult development continues. The person who enters a psychologically healthy organization may find early relational schemas disrupted in a healthy way. They learn that authority can be trusted, that visibility is safe, and that uncertainty can be metabolized.
There is evidence for how that repair happens, and it is not the obvious thing. In a program of work on how adult attachment changes, Arriaga and colleagues drew the distinction the framework needs, between conditions that sustain an insecure model and conditions that repair it (Arriaga, Kumashiro, Simpson, & Overall, 2018). Following couples across the transition to parenthood, they found that feeling reassured lowered anxiety in the moment, but did not move the relational pattern at all. What moved it was competence, the lived experience of being effective in a demanding new role (Arriaga, Eller, Kumashiro, Rholes, & Simpson, 2021). Reassurance soothes, but it does not repair. A real role that builds real mastery does. This is what occupational reparenting looks like once someone measures it, and it illustrates what a developmental climate has to provide. The organization that changes an anxious member is not the warm one that keeps reassuring them. It is the one that lets them become genuinely good at something that matters. A warm place that never lets anyone grow competent can keep its people calm, dependent, and exactly as they arrived.
The opposite happens when the holding is poor. When the organization is built around anxiety, around the defensive needs of its founding psychology, around the confirmation of narrow relational schemas. There, adults who arrived with psychologically flexible schemas may find them narrowed and made rigid.
And the person who learned early that authority is dangerous may find that lesson confirmed by a punishing leadership culture. The person who learned that visibility invites humiliation may find it reinforced in an environment that shames failure and rewards self-erasure. The person who learned that difference is intolerable may find no room in the organizational culture to be known as a whole and particular self. In this way the organization does not only withhold the conditions for development. It actively reactivates the relational wounds a person carries from earlier in life, deepens them, and binds the person more tightly to the patterns they most need to outgrow.
If the workplace functions as a primary developmental environment for adults, then variation in the organization’s developmental climate is a population-level exposure with population-level consequences for physical and psychological health. The epidemiological work on adverse childhood experiences established that sustained exposure to pathological relational environments produces measurable, cumulative developmental harm (Felitti et al., 1998).
The workplace half of that claim has already been studied. Following ten thousand British civil servants over years, the Whitehall II study found that where a person sat in the organization predicted their health. As they progressed down the ranks, they noted an increase in illness and death that was not explained by their health behaviors (Marmot et al., 1991). The mechanism was illustrated by Karasek, who showed that high demand paired with low control produces measurable strain (Karasek, 1979). Add those health stressors up across the population and Goh, Pfeffer, and Zenios put the cost at roughly a hundred and twenty thousand deaths a year in the United States and as much as eight percent of national health spending (Goh, Pfeffer, & Zenios, 2016).
The same logic applies to adverse organizational experience. The mechanisms are structurally similar: repeated activation of threat responses, confirmation of maladaptive relational schemas, and erosion of reflective capacity. This is what may be the field’s most significant long-term implication. A public health argument, built on mechanisms structurally similar to those the ACE framework established for childhood, for taking organizational developmental climate seriously as a determinant of adult psychological health.
VI. The Field’s Questions
Organizational Psychogenetics (OPG) is a coherent theoretical framework, grounded in clinical observation and in adjacent research traditions, that generates specific and testable questions. These questions are the research agenda of a field that is beginning. The field develops as they are addressed.
On founding. How specifically does founder psychology encode itself in organizational structure? What are the mechanisms of transmission, and which are most resistant to change? What conditions at founding, beyond founder psychology, contribute to the organizational psychological character? How does the founding psychology of an organization interact with the broader cultural and historical conditions in which it is embedded?
On transmission. What determines whether founding psychology is transmitted intact, modified, or disrupted across generations of membership? What role does leadership succession play in either perpetuating or interrupting founding psychology? Are there specific organizational features, narrative structures, formal policies, informal practices, that are particularly effective carriers of founding psychological material?
On developmental climate. What are the dimensions of organizational developmental climate, and how are they measured? What are the population-level consequences of sustained exposure to different types of organizational developmental climate? How do individual developmental histories interact with organizational developmental climates? Which histories are most vulnerable to specific types of pathological climate, and which are most resilient?
On repair. Can organizations with traumatic founding psychologies be genuinely repaired, and if so, what does repair look like in structural instead of only symbolic terms? What is the role of founder psychology intervention in organizational repair? When is repair possible from within, and when does it require external intervention?
On public health. The ACE framework provides a model for how population-level exposure to adverse developmental environments can be measured, studied, and ultimately reduced through policy intervention (Felitti et al., 1998). What would an equivalent framework for adverse organizational developmental climate look like? What are the measurable units of exposure, what are the dose-response relationships between exposure duration and developmental outcome, and at what level of policy is intervention most tractable?
VII. Discussion
I want to be honest about what this paper is and what it is not.
It is a founding statement, not a completed science. The research designs that would test these claims have not yet been fully developed. The measurement tools do not yet exist in their final form. The practical frameworks that would translate this theory into real organizational change are still being built. I am naming the territory before I have mapped it, because the territory needed to be defined. The absence of completed answers is not a limitation of the framework. It is the honest condition of a field at its beginning. The rest of this section is about where that beginning should go.
The most significant opportunity is the integration of the causal chain. The framework proposes that founding psychology generates organizational psychological structures, that those structures are transmitted and inherited by members, and that this inheritance shapes adult development. Each relationship draws on a distinct body of existing evidence. The founding conditions claim draws on a substantial organizational ecology literature. The transmission claim draws on clinical observation and systems psychodynamic theory. The developmental claim draws on attachment theory and adult developmental psychology. An integrated empirical account that traces the full chain, from founding conditions through transmission mechanisms to developmental outcome, in a single population, would be a landmark contribution. No existing tradition has attempted it, and this framework is uniquely positioned to produce it.
A second opportunity is the relationship between founding conditions and founder psychology. I have argued that material founding conditions cannot fully account for the specificity, persistence, or affective charge of the organizational psychological patterns we observe today, and that founding psychology is the genotype from which those patterns are expressed. Establishing precisely how founder psychology and founding conditions interact, and what each contributes independently to organizational psychological character, opens a genuinely new line of inquiry at the intersection of organizational ecology, clinical psychology, and developmental theory. The answers will matter for the field and for practitioners working with founders at the earliest and most formative stages of organizational life.
A third opportunity is the self-selection dynamic. Organizations that select for members whose relational schemas match their psychological character are, over time, deepening and concentrating a particular psychological inheritance. Understanding the mechanisms by which that selection operates, and identifying the conditions under which it can be interrupted or diversified, would have profound implications for how organizations think about membership and belonging. This is also where the framework’s developmental claims become most significant. If organizational membership can confirm and deepen existing schemas, it can also, under the right conditions, disrupt and expand them.
A fourth opportunity is the transmission mechanisms themselves. The identified patient, leadership succession pathology, foreclosed territory, and narrative gaps are presented in this paper as distinct mechanisms supported by clinical and observational evidence. A deeper investigation of how these mechanisms relate to one another, whether they operate independently or as expressions of a common underlying process, and which are most amenable to intervention, would build the measurement foundation the field requires. An organizational diagnostic instrument built around these mechanisms would not only advance the science. It would give practitioners the tools to see what is currently invisible in the organizations they are trying to change.
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