Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

Introduction

Manfred Florian Robert Kets de Vries, born in Huizen in the Netherlands in 1942, is a Dutch scholar, psychoanalyst and consultant who spent his career arguing that organisations cannot be understood without the unconscious. He is Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organisational Change Emeritus at INSEAD, where he held the Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chair of Leadership Development from 1992 to 2013, and the founder of the Kets de Vries Institute. He has written, co-written or edited more than fifty books and upwards of four hundred articles and chapters, translated into thirty-one languages, on leadership, narcissism, family business, career dynamics and organisational change.

His contribution is the clinical paradigm: the claim that irrational behaviour in organisations has a discoverable logic, that much of mental life lies outside awareness, that emotion is central to who a person is, that development is a lifelong interpersonal process, and that the past is the lens through which the present is understood and the future shaped. On that basis he built a way of studying executives that reads a company as a symptom of its leader's inner conflicts, and a form of leadership development closer to group psychotherapy than to management training.

He is not a psychologist by training. His degrees are in economics and business administration, and his analytic credentials come from clinical training rather than from an academic psychology department. That fact matters for how his work should be read, and for the criticism it has attracted.

Early Life and Education

Kets de Vries was born in the Netherlands in 1942 and took a master's degree in economics at the University of Amsterdam in 1966. He then went to Harvard Business School, where he completed the International Teachers Program in 1967, an MBA, and a Doctor of Business Administration in 1970.

The decisive intellectual event came at Harvard. He attended Abraham Zaleznik's seminar on psychoanalytic psychology and management theory, at a time when Zaleznik was one of the very few people arguing that Freud belonged in a business school. Kets de Vries has described the encounter as a revelation, and it set the direction of everything that followed. Zaleznik became a collaborator, and their joint Power and the Corporate Mind appeared in 1975.

He then did what almost no management academic had done: he trained clinically. From 1977 to 1982 he underwent psychoanalytic training at the Canadian Psychoanalytic Institute, and has been a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society since 1982. He is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association and a corresponding member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society.

Academic and Professional Career

Before settling at INSEAD he held professorships at McGill University, at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Montréal, and at Harvard Business School, and lectured widely. He joined INSEAD in the 1980s, held the Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chair from September 1992 to March 2013, and received the school's Distinguished Teacher Award five times.

At INSEAD he founded the Global Leadership Centre and the Executive Master in Change, a degree programme built explicitly on his psychodynamic and systemic approach, and directed The Challenge of Leadership, the school's senior executive seminar. He co-founded the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations and became its Lifetime Distinguished Member in 2009. Outside the university he founded the Kets de Vries Institute, a consultancy that sells the same method he researches, and he has consulted in more than forty countries. He is also a distinguished visiting professor at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin.

His awards include the Harry and Miriam Levinson Award from the American Psychological Association in 2001 for contributions to organisational consultation, the International Leadership Association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, the Freud Memorial Award from the Dutch Psychoanalytic Institute in September 2010 (INSEAD faculty CV), and election as a Fellow of the Academy of Management. He holds honorary doctorates from IEDC Bled School of Management and from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, and was made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The clinical paradigm

Kets de Vries's organising idea is that management theory and psychoanalysis can be joined, and that the result explains things neither explains alone. The clinical paradigm rests on a small set of premises: there is a logic to behaviour that looks irrational; a great deal of feeling, fear and motive is unconscious; nothing is more central to a person than how they regulate and express emotion; development is a continuous interpersonal process; and the past is the lens through which the present is read. From these he derived a method in which executives are helped to become what he calls organisational detectives, reading the undercurrents in their own firms.

The neurotic organisation

With Danny Miller he developed the idea that organisations mirror the neuroses of their leaders. The Neurotic Organization (1984) described how a chief executive's defensive style propagates through strategy, structure and culture, producing firms that can be described as paranoid, compulsive, dramatic, depressive or schizoid. The framework gave consultants a vocabulary for describing a toxic workplace as a clinical entity, and it remains one of the best-known attempts to apply psychopathology at the level of the firm.

Narcissism, imposture and the dark side of leadership

His most empirically cited work concerns narcissism. The 1985 Human Relations paper with Miller, Narcissism and Leadership: An Object Relations Perspective, argued that narcissistic dynamics are common among people who seek command, that they produce characteristic organisational damage, and that the route to mitigation is therapeutic rather than structural. He extended this to the entrepreneurial personality, arguing that many founders are driven by an innovative rebelliousness rooted in early deprivation or loss. He also popularised, in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, the notion that senior executives frequently feel like impostors, an idea that has since detached from his work and entered general usage.

Authentizotic organisations and group coaching

The constructive half of his programme is the authentizotic organisation, from Greek roots meaning authentic and vital to life: a firm in which people feel alive rather than controlled. He argues that leadership is a team sport and prefers group coaching to one-to-one work, on the grounds that the pathologies of a top team have to be surfaced in front of each other. This intervention method is the one most widely copied in business schools and consulting firms.

Major Publications

Kets de Vries, M. F. R., & Zaleznik, A. (1975). Power and the Corporate Mind — the first product of the Harvard encounter, on the psychology of executive power.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R., & Miller, D. (1984). The Neurotic Organization: Diagnosing and Changing Counterproductive Styles of Management (Jossey-Bass) — the book that made organisational neurosis a working concept.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R., & Miller, D. (1985). Narcissism and leadership: An object relations perspective. Human Relations, 38(6), 583-601 — his most cited article.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2001). The Leadership Mystique: A User's Manual for the Human Enterprise (FT Press) — the general statement of the clinical paradigm for practitioners.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2005). The Dangers of Feeling Like a Fake. Harvard Business Review — the essay that brought executive impostor feelings into management vocabulary.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2006). The Leader on the Couch: A Clinical Approach to Changing People and Organizations (Wiley) — character types from the abrasive to the antisocial, with case material.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2011). The Hedgehog Effect: The Secrets of Building High Performance Teams — the group coaching method.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2018). Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership — later reflections, including on leadership dysfunction and mortality.
Kets de Vries, M. F. R., & Cheak, A. (2014). Psychodynamic Approach (SSRN working paper) — his own summary of the paradigm, including a frank list of its weaknesses.

Impact and Legacy

Kets de Vries did more than anyone to make psychoanalysis respectable inside management education. Before his work, business schools treated organisations as rational systems; after it, a generation of executive programmes included reflection, biography and group dynamics as standard components. The International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, the Executive Master in Change, and the widespread use of team coaching in executive development all descend from his programme. The American Psychological Association's Levinson Award, unusual for someone outside academic psychology, marks the crossing he made.

The criticism is substantial and comes from inside the tradition as well as outside it. An INSEAD working paper on the psychodynamic approach lists it plainly. Much of the founding work rests on clinical observation of people in treatment, so it is premised on dysfunction rather than on ordinary behaviour; the concepts are subjective and difficult to prove scientifically; the approach does not lend itself to standardised training, because the route to change varies by individual; and it situates the intervention at the level of the individual, so structural and systemic issues stay in the background. Kets de Vries and Cheak acknowledge the unfalsifiability charge themselves.

Two further objections cut deep. The first is specificity. The psychodynamic account of entrepreneurship, in which the founder's troubled childhood produces innovative rebelliousness, fits a narrow and extreme group and says nothing about the many people with comparable backgrounds who neither rebel nor found companies; it is easier to tell the story after the fact than to predict who will become an entrepreneur. The second is that much of the vocabulary, narcissistic leader, neurotic organisation, authentizotic culture, is interpretive rather than measured, and the measurable proxies used by the subsequent literature on CEO narcissism, from signature size to pronoun use in earnings calls, have not been established as valid indicators of the clinical construct they are said to tap.

Finally there is a structural conflict of interest. Kets de Vries researches leadership development, runs the programmes that deliver it, and directs a consultancy that sells it. The same is true of much of the field, but his version of it is unusually concentrated in one person. His defenders would say that the clinical tradition has never pretended to be a randomised trial, and that asking it to behave like one misjudges what it is for; his critics would say that after fifty books the evidence base should be thicker than it is.

Learn More

Sigmund Freud — the source of the psychoanalytic concepts Kets de Vries moved into management.
Erik Erikson — whose lifespan developmental theory underwrites the clinical paradigm's account of the past as lens.
All Psychologists — browse the full biographical collection.