The emergence of emotions in organizations: Cross-fertilizing the insights of Armstrong and Lacan

This paper addresses the question of the emergence and consequences of emotions such as satisfaction and dissatisfaction with and anger towards colleagues or powerful actors. Armstrong's and Lacanian insights are cross-fertilized to better understand these phenomena in the double movement of inactment of emotions from the environment to the subject and of enactment of emotions from the subject to the environment. I analyze these phenomena using Lacan's work on the relationship between obsessional and hysteric subjects and their environment. These relationships are based respectively on satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and both lead to anxiety and the fear of disappearance rather than to proactive action that would enable (inter-)organizational change.