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This study takes a critical look at the institutional and social practices at
work, and how these are played out within social institutional relations. It
is proposed that these practices have an impact on psychological health
and well-being of employees. More specifically, it is argued that the culture
of teamwork and flexibility being practiced in multinational corporations
MNCs has a manufactured appearance about it. The culture creates a
social sphere that does not appear authentic, but merely manages to provide
functional cohesiveness. The practices prevalent within the organisation
generate a complex mix of factors facilitating regulatory control, promising
rewards and obscuring penalties. Although, this is not completely
understood by most employees, these practices have a definite impact on
employee health and coping strategies used. With the demise of Weber’s
iron cage of rationality, management of organisation is about orchestrating
the collective emotions of employees. Under such a complex environment
the employee struggles in various ways and with variable success, either
for readily fusing with the corporate, defensively struggling to make sense
of ambiguous work situations or at times aggressively asserting against
these processes. Data are drawn from semi-structured interviews, participant
observation and document analysis. The research has been carried out in
the interpretive tradition. The paper brings to the fore the socialpsychological
dimensions of work and their implications for psychological
well being of employees. It is argued that the new cultural practices replace
traditional lines of authority by flexi-structured dotted lines of management
only at the manifest level. But, power however transmuted has not gone off
totally. Rather, it operates more smoothly now in the emotional domain.