Managing by Fear: How Anxiety Kills Innovation

We’ve all seen it: the company that insists on endless reporting, demands results yesterday, and yet hesitates to take real risks. Meetings multiply, creativity shrinks, and everyone feels like they’re working harder while moving slower. This isn’t just “bad management.” It’s the symptom of a psychological structure.

I usually write about the psychology of individuals, because mental health is something we should care for, stay aware of, and act upon. We don’t carry a therapist in our pocket, so I build tools to help people navigate their own lives, to move closer to that “symbolic man” I’ve mentioned in previous posts.

Today I’m zooming out. In my years as an engineer, scientist, project leader, and manager across different cultures and countries, I’ve encountered another layer: the psychology of organizations. Alongside that work, I’ve spent years studying Lacanian psychoanalysis and applying it to understand how people and organizations function, and, more importantly, how they can function better. At the center of this is the way managers’ psychological structures shape collective behavior, for good or for ill.

Companies like to believe their behavior is determined by procedures and best practices. Yet behind every procedure there is a manager, and managers are human. They make mistakes; they carry unconscious desires and fears; and those dynamics ripple through entire organizations.

From a Lacanian perspective, companies often run on a neurotic logic: always demanding results, haunted by a sense that something is missing, even if no one can say exactly what. Targets become an endless mission; once achieved, they’re immediately replaced by new ones. Within this logic, managers’ behavior tends to align with one of three fundamental structures Lacan described, neurotic, perverse, or psychotic. Their actions reveal how each structure manages desire, lack, and the law through both the company’s rules and their own internal prohibitions.

The Fractal Structures: The Engine of Desire, Lack, and Law

From a Lacanian perspective, human subjectivity is not simply influenced by desire, lack, and law, it is constituted by them. These three forces form an interlocking system that structures how we experience reality.

When the psyche fixates too rigidly on one of these poles, the dynamic balance collapses and crystallizes into an unconscious structure. This is how the three fundamental structures of subjectivity arise:

• Fixation on Desire → The Perverse Structure
• Fixation on Lack → The Psychotic Structure
• Fixation on Law → The Neurotic Structure

These structures are not choices or personalities; they are deep, unconscious orientations toward reality, others, and authority.

And this logic does not stop at the individual. Because organizations are built by people and led by managers, the same structures repeat at higher scales. It is a fractal system: what becomes rigid in one psyche is mirrored in a manager’s style and then amplified in the culture of the company.

Desire

Desire is not a need to be satisfied, but a relentless force that drives us. It is the endless wanting for the sake of wanting, always shifting to a new object once an old one is obtained.

• In the Individual: It is the search for what we believe will complete us (love, status, success), though it never can.
• In the Manager: It manifests as ambition, the drive for control, or the need for recognition.
• In the Company: It is the engine of growth: the perpetual pursuit of new targets, new markets, and “the next thing,” not for survival, but to keep the engine of desire running.

Lack

Lack is not a gap to be filled, but the fundamental void that desire circles around. It is the original loss that enters when we become speaking beings, and it is the structural reason desire can never be finally satisfied.

• In the Individual: It is the unconscious sense that “I am missing something,” which desire futilely tries to answer.
• In the Manager: It appears as a deep-seated insecurity and the anxiety of being exposed as a “fraud” who doesn’t have the answers.
• In the Company: It is institutionalized as the ever-missing “final result.” No profit is high enough; no market share is complete. The target is always reset, ensuring the lack remains operative.

Law

The Law (the Symbolic Order) is not just a set of rules. It is the overarching structure of language, culture, and norms that gives shape to desire and provides a shared reality to contain our lack. It prohibits certain satisfactions, which in turn structures and channels our desire.

• In the Individual: It is internalized as the “shoulds” and “should nots” of the superego, often manifesting as guilt or a sense of duty.
• In the Manager: It is enacted as a rigid adherence to procedure, metrics, and hierarchy—a desperate attempt to use the external law to manage internal anxiety.
• In the Company: It becomes bureaucracy, compliance, and corporate culture—the symbolic framework that attempts to organize the chaotic forces of desire and lack into a predictable system.

The Neurotic Manager’s Rise

The neurotic manager thrives on rules and order but is terrified of transgression. Afraid of being wrong, they hide behind procedures. They demand endless reports, constant validation, and visible proof of control. At first, it looks like discipline. But soon it suffocates creativity. For them, anything new feels like a threat (an invitation to failure) so innovation is quietly strangled before it can take root.

Why does this structure so often find a home in middle management?

Because the neurotic manager’s structure is perfectly compatible with the neurotic logic of the modern corporation. They offer the system exactly what it craves: predictability, the illusion of control, and a manageable narrative. Their anxiety-driven repression dovetails seamlessly with the organization’s own repression of disruptive desire and creativity. In middle and lower management, this alignment makes them invaluable guardians of the status quo.

For certain corporations, this is not only acceptable but effective. In contexts where the work is primarily about execution, meeting production targets, delivering predictable outputs, or ensuring compliance, the neurotic manager’s caution and obsession with measurement are a functional asset. But when the role requires invention, experimentation, or the testing of new ideas, the same traits become a liability, lethal to progress. What ensures safety in routine operations becomes a killer of innovation.

In this sense, companies don’t truly promote “innovation” or “vision”; they promote the management of their own anxiety. The neurotic manager excels at this. They are rewarded for behaviors that bring short-term comfort (metrics, reports, and compliance) while long-term growth and risk-taking are sidelined.

It’s important to distinguish this rise from that of the perverse manager, who often climbs faster and higher by exploiting the rules of the system for personal power. The psychotic type, in contrast, destabilizes the system altogether. The neurotic manager is different: they do not conquer the system. They become its most loyal servant, faithfully reproducing its cycles of anxiety and control.

Beyond the Neurotic Logic

Most companies run on a neurotic logic, but not all. Some drift into other structures: the perverse, where rules are bent and people are treated as tools; or the psychotic, where the symbolic order itself collapses and fantasy replaces reality.

Each has its own consequences for leadership and innovation, a topic I will explore in future posts.

The Cost of Repression in Creative Departments

While all managerial structures can be damaging, the neurotic manager inflicts a uniquely pervasive cost—especially in departments that rely on creativity and innovation. Their structure resonates so perfectly with the company’s own neurotic logic that they become a perfect instrument of repression, and repression is the enemy of new ideas.

I have seen in science how the refusal to allow new ideas to surface can kill progress for years. The neurotic manager replicates this dynamic exactly. They are not merely cautious; they are prohibitive. Decisions are perpetually delayed for more data. Experiments are blocked for not following established protocol. Team energy is exhausted defending existing procedures rather than exploring new possibilities. The unstated goal is not to find the best path, but to avoid the wrong step.

The damage is cumulative and corrosive. The organization may still function, delivering results that are late, safe, and profoundly uninspired. But the true cost is measured in human capital: talented people who initially burn out trying to navigate the bureaucracy, and ultimately leave in search of oxygen. What remains is an organization stripped of its vitality, doomed to endlessly repeat itself. It circles around the void of its own lack, too terrified to ever truly confront it and discover what lies on the other side.

Dealing With the Neurotic Manager in Creative Work

No manager can possibly master every technical specialty they oversee. This gap becomes decisive when new ideas surface. A neurotic manager, anxious about uncertainty, may instinctively reject what they don’t understand, clinging to tradition or relying on a single “expert voice.” If that voice is itself neurotic and fearful, innovation is suffocated twice over.

The alternative is a shift across the entire fractal:

• At the individual level: Each person must learn to tolerate their own lack—the fact that not every question has an immediate answer, that uncertainty is part of creativity. The engineer, scientist, or designer who embraces not-knowing opens the door to discovery.
• At the managerial level: Leaders must resist the temptation to control through endless procedures. Their role is not to be the most competent specialist, but to structure an environment where others can speak, test, and challenge without fear of ridicule or punishment. Awareness of their own structure is crucial; without it, they fall mechanically back into repression.
• At the organizational level: Companies must stop rewarding only short-term predictability. If their policies, KPIs, and cultural norms punish risk, they will reproduce the neurotic cycle endlessly. But if they allow democratic discussion, experimentation, and moments of disruption, they can convert anxiety into innovation.

Innovation, then, is not just a matter of clever ideas. It requires a different relation to desire, lack, and law at every scale of the system.

In practice, the way forward is simple but difficult: listen more than you command, create spaces where the silenced can speak, and let uncertainty live long enough for truth to emerge. That is how individuals grow, how managers lead, and how companies survive.

A Final Word

What repeats in the individual repeats in the manager. Under pressure the mask slips, and what is sick in the person seeps into the company—until someone dares to break the cycle. Too often it falls to a single person. 

Innovation begins the moment fear steps down from power.