12 Ways Trauma Impairs Organizational Health and Function

Organizational consulting and trauma theory make sense of team dysfunction.

Trauma can play out in organizations and groups in destructive and constructive ways. Destructive “enactments” are more likely occur when there is unseen and unaddressed trauma tainting how people make sense of reality.

Sandra Bloom, psychiatrist and public health expert, breaks down trauma’s impact on organizational function (2011).

12 Features of Traumatized Organizations

From a “group-as-a-whole” perspective, organizations and groups respond to trauma in much the way that individuals do, though they are also uniquely more complex. Whether a corporation, a clinic, a community group, a building board, a family, or practically any other group from small to large, organizations, like people, can develop significant post-traumatic syndromes.

1. Parallel process. Parallel process is the playing out of patterns contagiously from person to person, and on the group and organizational level, often showing up throughout the organization like termite tunnels in a wooden house. An example of parallel process: A supervisor mirrors being hypercritical of a supervisee who is working with a client who is…