The Organizational Underground: Organizational Coaching and Organization Development Outside the Formal Organization

The organizational underground represents a large percentage of our adult population and presents many challenges to society and to organizations, to organization development and coaching professionals. Collectively, the organizational underground is the largest organization in the nation–one without pay, benefits, esteem, or positive economic impact. The challenges this presents to society are numerous. When unemployment is chronic, it becomes a pestilence that pervades toxically through families and society and has lasting impact long after recessions have ebbed (ibid.). We have yet to see the scars that will endure once the economy moves into stronger recovery.

The number of jobs needed to return to five percent unemployment rate, where we were at the beginning of the Great Recession, is a staggering ten million. The minimum time it would take to reach that number is two years, and that timeframe would only be realistic if job growth was immediate and sustainable. Many economists are predicting that the new floor for unemployment will be in the 7-8% range. One of the reasons is that business leaders are focused on short-term performance versus the long-term value creation. We would argue that the long-term blind spot of many corporate leaders has led to an ignorance of the housing market decline and unethical financial services industry practices. The opportunity for organizational coaches to facilitate change in the focus of business leaders is one of the most positive impacts coaches could have on society. “We’re about to see a big national experiment on stress,“ Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, tells Peck (ibid.). Stress and possibly life time membership in the organizational underground.

Five Versions of Unemployment/Underemployment

The organizational underground is populated with a vast and highly diverse array of inhabitants. We have identified five categories in which to place these inhabitants—and are fully aware that there is considerable overlap between the categories, and that there are frequent transitions of inhabitants into other categories.

Unemployment

This category is comprised of those adults who are still trying to find a job or have given up trying to find a job. Part of the complexity associated with any assessment of job recovery is wrapped around this distinction. We know that the early stages of economic recovery usually produce an increased unemployment rate, because those who gave up hope during the economic downturn are now returning to the job-search market. They have renewed hope. Thus, during the first stage of economic recovery, the number of citizens who are returning to job search tends to offset the hiring of those already actively seeking employment. But what about the current economic recovery? Many economists and social analysts (such as those written about in the Atlantic article) believe that the job market will never fully recover. There simply are not enough new jobs in the new economy to offset job losses from the old economy. Some economists are calling this condition the “new normal” (Schwartz, 2010).