Harry Levinson, Psychologist for the Workplace, Dies at 90
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
Published: June 27, 2012
Harry Levinson, a psychologist who helped change corporate America’s
thinking about the workplace by demonstrating a link between job
conditions and emotional health — a progressive notion when he began
developing his ideas in the 1950s — died on Tuesday in Delray Beach,
Fla. He was 90.
Jim Bourg
Harry Levinson at his home, with a stylized sculpture
of workers. He studied happy, productive workers and their bosses.
His death was confirmed by his son Marc.
As a management consultant and an educator at Harvard, M.I.T. and other
universities, and through books, seminars and his own research
institute, Dr. Levinson showed how psychoanalytical theories and methods
could be used to motivate employees. He was among the first
psychologists to postulate a connection between thwarted career
aspirations and depression.
Many of his management theories are now practically truisms. But to the
gray-flannel corporate culture of the postwar years, they were novel,
compelling many managers to think beyond the traditional reward system
of promotions and paychecks to motivate employees.
One of Dr. Levinson’s ideas, put forth in his book “The Exceptional
Executive” (1968), held that companies must be “learning organizations”
and that their leaders must be teachers. The concept was adopted and
popularized decades later by John F. Welch Jr., the former General
Electric chairman and one of corporate America’s most influential
leaders.
Dr. Levinson argued that a psychological contract existed between
employees and employers, laying out the expectations each had of the
other. Employees who feel that their employers have violated that
contract will feel depressed, he said, and may well become
underachievers.
He envisioned an even more dire situation in which employees despair of
ever reaching their full potential — in psychological parlance, when
they face a wide gap between their self-image and their ego ideal. It
did not matter if such discontented employees were reacting to workplace
unfairness or to their own inherent insecurities, he said; in either
case, they were likely to feel helpless and depressed, and thus be
underproductive or even disruptive.
Dr. Levinson was an early promoter of the idea that companies, like
people, had distinct personalities, or cultures, that grew out of their
history and the demographics of their work force. He developed methods
to identify and isolate the elements of a company’s culture and discern
their impact on workers. His 1972 book on the subject, “Organizational
Diagnosis,” has been used widely as a business school text.
But as adept as Dr. Levinson was at diagnosing and curing corporate
ills, his main focus was on preventing them. His forte was identifying
and promoting the habits and attitudes that kept people functioning
well, and beginning in 1968 he built a lucrative business around it
through the Levinson Institute, a research and consulting concern in
Jaffrey, N.H.
Dr. Ralph G. Hirschowitz, a psychiatrist and former colleague of Dr.
Levinson’s at the Harvard Medical School and later a faculty member at
the institute, said, “When it came to applying psychoanalytic principles
to managing human beings, Harry was a true missionary.”
Harry Levinson was born on Jan. 16, 1922, in Port Jervis, N.Y. He was
the oldest of three children of David Levinson, a tailor, and the former
Gussie Nudell Levinson, both Jewish immigrants from Russia. His mother
never learned to speak English, but she did complain loudly — in Yiddish
— about the family’s meager means, Dr. Levinson recalled.
“My teachers, not my parents, were the agents of my civilization,” he told a reporter.
The young Harry learned early on that books could be a wonderful escape
from family strife and poverty. For hours he would sit in the local
public library, or huddled by the coal stove at home, and read book after book.
“That’s what I remember vividly, Harry with his nose in a book,”
Elizabeth Mungoven, a friend of Dr. Levinson’s since elementary school,
said in 2005.
He loved writing. In seventh grade he won his first writing award, a
silver medal (which he always kept) for an essay on President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, who was then in his first term.
Harry’s career goal as a teenager was to teach, but as a Jew in a time
of virulent anti-Semitism, he believed his chances of landing a teaching
job in New York State were slim. When a friendly high school guidance
counselor persuaded him that he would do better in the Midwest, he
enrolled in Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia State
University).
After receiving his bachelor of science degree in 1943, Dr. Levinson
joined the wartime Army serving mostly in Italy, where he often tried to
teach illiterate Army friends how to read. In 1946, he married his
childhood sweetheart, Roberta Freiman, and then earned a master’s degree
from Emporia State and a doctorate in clinical psychology from the
University of Kansas.
As part of his doctoral studies, Dr. Levinson spent two weeks observing
the way mentally ill patients were treated at the Topeka State Hospital
in Kansas, then submitted a paper describing how their treatment could
be improved. His ideas fell on receptive ears; the hospital hired him.
He then spent more than three years instituting better ways of keeping
track of patients, treating their ailments and raising the hospital’s
profile with legislators and potential donors.
The young doctor’s methods were soon noticed by William C. Menninger, a
co-founder of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, which was renowned for
innovative psychiatric methodologies. Dr. Menninger, whose clinic later
moved to Houston, invited Dr. Levinson to join the clinic, and to shift
his emphasis from curing sick people to helping well people stay well.
There Dr. Levinson seized on a theory that experiences at work were a
visceral part of being well, and he began visiting corporations to see
what they were doing to ensure the mental health of their employees. He
was stunned to discover that few, if any, were paying attention to it.
“Psychoanalytic theory and whatever usefulness it might have for
managing people was just unknown in industry,” Dr. Levinson recalled.
From then on, he devoted his career to filling that knowledge gap. In
1954 he created the Division of Industrial Mental Health at the
Menninger Foundation and began developing seminars on how to apply
psychoanalytic theory to leadership and management. He spent two years
interviewing about 840 employees of the Kansas Power and Light Company
to develop criteria for mental health in the workplace.
He looked for patterns in the ways the happiest, most productive
employees interacted with their bosses and when he found them, he
incorporated them into seminars and books. In 1968, Dr. Levinson moved
to Cambridge, Mass., taught graduate classes at the Harvard Business
School and became a professor of clinical psychology at the Harvard
Medical School.
His career thrived at Harvard, but his marriage did not; he and his
first wife were divorced in 1970. Twenty years later, he married Miriam
Lewis, whom he had met on a blind date.
Dr. Levinson wrote or edited 16 books as well as numerous articles in
The Harvard Business Review and other management publications. He was a
visiting professor of both psychology and business at the Sloan School
of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the
University of Kansas and Texas A&M University. For 14 years Dr.
Levinson offered a seminar to second-year M.B.A. students at Harvard in
which they spent a year “diagnosing” the problems of a local
organization.
He ran the Levinson Institute until 1991, when he sold it to Dr. Gerald
Krines. Macular degeneration began destroying Dr. Levinson’s eyesight in
2001, effectively ending his days of reading and writing.
Dr. Levinson had lived in Delray Beach since 1997. Besides his son Marc,
he is survived by his wife as well as another son, Brian; two
daughters, Kathy Levinson and Anne Levinson; and eight grandchildren.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 28, 2012
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misidentified the person who theorized that experiences at work were a visceral part of “being well”, and who began visiting corporations to study their efforts to ensure their employees’ mental health. It was Dr. Levinson, not Dr. William C. Menninger.
