461. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 11 (Greenberg, pt. 3)

I messed up big time and forgot to bring my CPAP to the doctor's appointment this afternoon.  I've been so engrossed in this blog that I just forgot.  The nurse told me that was was mad about it, but he didn't say so directly to me which was nice.  I felt very badly.  So now I need to help them get som prior sleep studies, so maybe I can try to make ammends by at least doing better in that.  I think I have all of them, except I'm not positive about the most recent one.  Then I just need to fax them to them.  There's something strange with the programming in my computer I think and it's made getting networking set up difficult.  I have to double check the fax set up.  I think we had that working, but I haven't used it since we first set it up. 

On my way to the doctor's appointment I thought of some other things I wanted to say on the last post, so I added them just now.  I can't tell you how liberating this is for me to go back and begin to under stand really more and more what happened back then.  It was so monumental in my life.

***

Extending these finding, Bies, Shapiro, and Cummings (1988) found that perceptions of procedural justice were enhanced only when explanations were believed to be adequately reasoned and sincerely communicated. (p. 412)

Continuing the discussion from the last time regarding the use of Jer. 12:5, the journal article, or even the psychological test - given in the context of the stress the mission had intentionally put me under, the mission, in the person of the H.R. director, had me in a difficult corner to get out of.  His reasoning sucked, as some would say.  But he had a pretty formidable collection of documentation that no one else in any rational context would ever accept.  But this wasn't about rational acceptance, I don't think, so much as it was about fear.  He had the power, I didn't and this is what he could do with his power if he had to.  The mission was like that though, so don't be surprised.  How he used it, was definitely not acceptable if it was to use psychology for the mission's ends (socialization). That is unacceptable.  (And to remind you, there were 2 other women who had experienced that also.)

That much I got.  The other thing was I thought I also had a decision to make about the mission (not just about going to the U.S., and whether I'd agree to it.)

Basically, while he must have thought he had adequately reasoned his explanation for why I should be sent to the U.S., I could argue away most of his documentation and he totally lacked any sincerity as far as I was concerned and I absolutely couldn't stand his ridiculous fatherly pitying demeanor. 

That's it in a nutshell.  Procedural justice basically didn't exist; that goes for the whole 2 years I was with the mission.

***

Thus, this study supported the idea that high status job titles may function as outcomes in the equity equation. (p. 413)

Initially (i.e., in the 1990s when I first copied the article), I had a larger section of text highlighted, but it goes more into things that I don't think are relevant enough to warrant using.  The thing is that when I was a secretary of the assistant director technically I did have some status.  That doesn't mean that it really was the career I wanted but when I was moved to other positions I didn't even have that status, so I lost the status even.  And it's something that people know.  It's not a secret, and this even is the kind of thing that might happen at other companies or jobs, so you might know what I mean.  You can tell if someone has been demoted and loses status, right?  So if I'm going to be a secretary, it might as well be the secretary to someone at the top.  But it was my sending mission who offered it to me, suggested the position, it wasn't my idea to ask specifically for that one position. 

***

Greenberg (1988a) compared the performance of insurance underwriters who temporarily performed their jobs in either the offices of higher-status, lower-status, or equal-status co-workers.  Reasoning that the opportunity to work in a higher status office constituted an increase in work rewards, it was expected that such individuals would report feeling overpaid and would increase their performance.  Likewise, reasignment to a lower-status office was expected to be a source of underpayment, leading to a decreased performance.  Finally, workers in a control group performed their jobs in the office of another person of equal-status and were expected to experience no change in their perceptions of payment equity and to exhibit no changes in their performance.  Very strong support was found for each of these predictions, thereby suggesting that the status-value of offices constitutes a valid source of outcomes in the equity formula. (p. 413)

According to this, then, I should have lowered my productivity when the mission transferred me to the lower positions.  Rats.  I missed out.  I rather like the application of this journal article.  This should be something that is brought to the attention of all future recruits to the mission - that they come with a full collection of journal articles ready to present their case for whatever it is that they want to suggest or ask of the mission.  At any rate the mission does it, so maybe it's worth a try.

***

I'm going to include this next section because I had it so marked up from the original reading (1990s), but I'm knocking my head trying to piece together what was so important about this text.  Actually, I'm just glad I haven't had this happen more often.  Here goes.

Griffeth et al. (1989) found that a sample of part-time proofreaders were more uncomfortable being overpaid relative to another to whom they were attracted (i.e., someone who was attitudinally similar to themselves) than someone to whom they were not attracted.  Greater attempts to reduce the inequity theory's prediction that states of overpayment may be undesirable and motivate efforts at redress.  Apparently, this effect is stronger when the overpayment disadvantages a comparison person who is liked than one who is not liked (see also Greenberg, 1978).  (p. 414)

I'm sort of stumped.   The mission didn't pay anyone, so you can't take it literally.  As far as favors and rewards, the one thing I can think of is maybe the last year I was with the mission I began to hear about some cases of either jealousy or a couple of people both wanting the same thing - these were women.  I stayed out of it, but just heard about it.  So if someone succeeded in getting this position or whatever, maybe that would fall into what this verse describes, or something like it. 

The thing with me was that I was living on thin ice, remember, so I couldn't risk getting in the middle of anything. (I was keeping my true thoughts and values hidden from the mission, but if they'd know about them all hell would have broken lose, believe me. This was after I'd returned to Vienna from the U.S.)

This was part of the ambiguity of the mission, and I never knew when these things were true.  That is I didn't know if the things these women wanted were just fabrications to confuse me or something the mission was really considering to happen in a year or two.  And I didn't really know if that particular person was telling the truth that she really wanted that position.  But in the end it didn't really matter much anyway because I wasn't going to be there, right?  So good luck, have fun, I hope you get the position.

That's an oversimplification, too, though, because I was also doing a few things trying to figure out what I was going to do next.  Certainly, by winter before I left I was doing serious thinking about what I was going to do after I left.

***

It was found that when managers attempted to resolve disputes by the use of threats or coercion, the disputing parties judged these actions and the resulting resolution to be unfair.  The use of mediation procedures was judged to be procedurally fair, and the compromise solution solutions that typically followed from them were judged to be unfair.  The use of mediation procedures was judged to be procedurally fair, and the compromise solutions that typically followed from them were judged to be distributively fair... Specifically, "Third-party roles viewed as procedurally just are those in which a manager acting as a third party tries to mediate a resolution rather than bullying the parties into a resolution by threatening sanctions, promising benefits, or imposing ideas" (Karambayya & Brett, 1989: 703) (p. 415)

This is the kind of thing I could have only dreamed of in the Vienna mission.  Of course, it would have had to have been me vs. the mission, rather than me vs. John Doe.  To me being sent back to the USA was a kind of threat, a wake up call, if you will.  It let me know what extent the mission was willing to go to to socialize me.  And what if sending me home didn't work?  What else could they do to me?  I didn't find out, of course.  (Thankfully.)  The thing was that I hid the fact from them that I hadn't been socialized even after being sent back to the U.S., so that when they they did finally out it was almost time for me to be leaving to be going home anyway. 

But what if something had happened and they had found out earlier that I still wasn't socialized?  What other tools would there still have been left up their sleeves to use?  I don't even want to think about it. That would have been the worse hell I could have imagined.  All I know is that I would not be the same person today if they had found out, believe me.

***

Participants in one laboratory experiment (Brockner, Davy, & Carter, 1985) witnessed one of their coworkers get laid off for no justifiable reason and without receiving any compensation for the work performed to that point.  Relative to their laid-off colleagues, the survivors were hypothesized to feel overpaid.  Consistent with the equity theory predictions, the survivors reported feeling guiltier and worked harder when they witnessed such layoffs than when no layoffs occurred... (p. 416)

They may have been afraid that they might have been the next to go too, though, so you can't forget that issue as well!  But that aside, I suppose it would be too much to think that anyone at the mission thought I was treated wrongly and felt like these workers felt when I left.  The thing was that it seemed like the mission was already formulating a myth or explanation about  me and people were staying away from me, so I don't know what they were saying but they were telling people what to think about my departure and maybe about my whole time with the mission even, for all I know, since it was so rocky.  I even had a high school friend who had worked with another Eastern European mission and she shunned me after my time with the Vienna mission too - her mission had ties with the Vienna mission too.

So there you have it.  Basically, because I refused to back down on my values I was anathema.  That's exactly what happened, because that's the whole reason I would not commit to them.  And if they think that's crazy, so be it.

(That being said, they did not know upfront that on my end I was holding out because of values.)

It's only my values that I stood up for the whole time, but my knowledge and wisdom made it possible. 

(I'm not saying that to brag, but it did take intelligence that I was underestimated for, it was difficult.)

***

And that is the end of the Greenberg article.

460. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 10 (Greenberg, pt. 3)

Continuing with the same article...

Referent congnitions theory... Specifically, RCT theorizes that, "In a situation involving outcomes allocated by a decision maker, resentment is maximized when people believe they would have obtained better outcomes if the decision maker had used other procedures that should have been implemented." (Cropandzano & Folger, 1989: 293-294). (p. 410)

The thing about the Vienna mission situation was that you didn't have a referent point to compare against as to what was the "other procedures that should have been implemented."  Well, that is, there were no local concrete and very specifically stated procedures.  So then you're left with idealized procedures, the kinds that you might learn in business school, the kinds you might find in textbooks, or the kind that you might find on professional organization web sites and in professional organization ethics statements.  Can you see the idealist coming out in me?  Well, that's all we're left with, isn't it?  What other options are there? 

Don't answer that.  I don't even want to know what the other options are, because I'm afraid to know and I'm sure if there are other options the mission would come up with them just to avoid having real, valid "other procedures that should have been implemented" that were fair and just.

No, on second thought... I can't leave it at that.  Having spent 2 tortuous years with the Vienna mission I just absolutely dread the thought that they would misuse Scripture to make it a false foundation of their outcome system, but they would do just that, pulling it out of the hat on as "as needed" basis.  So the Scripture, just the right one misused with some new and strange meaning and connotation could be pulled out of the hat whenever the mission needed to get a message across to a person irregardless of the work they were doing or the quality of it, so that the missionaries' work input may bear little or no apparent (or real) outcome to the outcome.

This is an extreme case - mine - and I don't know for sure if anyone else experienced it, but I think that some people might have gotten snippets of it during rough socializations, but they got on track before it had any significant effect on their career with the mission.  But it may have been enough to let them see what I mean.   Otherwise, this was primarily uniquely my experience.

But the problem with continually saying that this was uniquely my experience is that it means that the mission is capable of doing this.  The mission is capable of acting like this.  Does this mean that the mission is showing its true colors in how it treats me?  I think yes and no.  Yes to the management, the inner beast of the thing.  I'm not sure where the decisions were made to treat me how I was treated, but whereever those decisions were made, that was the true nature of the mission.  And for everyone who just played along as in groupthink, I count them in too, because that's the true nature of the mission.  The fact that they're like that is the true nature of the mission.  No these aren't its true colors in as much as it could be considered an aberration.

Ironically, though, it comes down to this: everything was happening behind closed doors, and I didn't know anything about how my fate was being decided.  This theory deals with procedures and that is the one glaring thing that would have helped beyond words, but is exactly the thing that is unimaginable at the same time.  Before I left the USA to go to Vienna I was completely open and honest with my desires and honest, but as soon as I stepped foot in Austria they took those things I'd been honest about and (what seemed to me to be) intentionally disregarded and at the same time then did everything in my regard from then on behind closed doors.  So I didn't really have any say in any of my relations with the mission. 

All things considered, I think it's reasonable to say that, "In this situation involving outcomes allocated by a decision maker [my boss, others in the mission], my resentment was maximized when I believed that I would have obtained better outcomes if the decision maker had used other procedures that should have been implemented."

Do you see how that works?  I wasn't given a chance at all, even right from the beginning.  And  I had this stellar track record of work, studies and living in Eastern Europe and all of a sudden it all came crashing down around me by these people.  It was horrible, but at least I held on to my conscience.  So that was the one thing that remained intact through the rubble.  Well, and my intelligence.  They tried to demean me and make me lose my confidence in my intelligence and I let them believe that I had given in to them... they never really knew though.  They always, to the very end underestimated me.  That was what saved me. 

***

Notably, Tyler and Bies... have reviewed evidence supporting the existence of five criteria related to the perceived fairness of treatment in organizations; (a) adequately considering others' viewpoints, (b) suppressing personal biases, (c) consistently applying decision-making criteria, (d) providing timely feedback about decisions, and (e) adequately explaining the basis for decisions. (p. 412)

This is talking about giving adequate explanations for decisions; that's what the paragraph is discussing.  I think for those who were in the regular track with the mission they probably worked with the mission to come to decisions together.  But not always.  Because the mission always reserved the right to just make decisions and there always was a certain amount of ambiguity that we knew was a part of the work.  So some things maybe you didn't always know why or the whole story behind.

But how far does this go?  Is there a limit?  With the Vienna mission, the leadership really had a carte blanche to do whatever it wanted and nobody said peep, like how it treated me.  I don't think anyone complained, even though I think especially towards the end there must have been people who knew me the best who questioned the way I was being treated.  But I was leaving and they were staying and they couldn't risk stepping out of sync over spilled milk when it was too late anyway.

And even when I first arrive in Vienna that was my thing, that, sure, I had no qualms with a certain amount of security precautions for working in the Communist countries - working in "closed countries."  But full-blown paranoia?  Living lives of deception that any spy would envy?  I think not!  And that's why the Soviet guest at the Goodwill Games a couple years later thought my dad had trained me in something I didn't even have a clue my dad might be involved in whereas it was from the Vienna mission! 

I had come to Vienna to join a Christian mission, not a pseudo spy venture and I wanted to live more by faith and less by ends justifies the means.

This all being considered, let's consider what the Vienna mission - the decision making processes - should have looked more like according to Tyler and Bess.

The Vienna mission did consider other's viewpoints, depending on the issue.  However, the missionary's viewpoint might have been one of the last viewpoint's to be considered, in my experience.  Well, I learned that I was very expendable, but that may be because they wanted me out of there.  It may have been that other missionaries might not have felt as expendable as I felt.  If the reason I felt so expendable was that I was expendable, because of my dad, then that's a really horrible connection to my dad because that makes me feel very small and meaningless in the scope of things.  Then I can't help remember my friend Nina's words in Russia that I'm just a pawn in their game and they don't care about me, and the pawn illustration then extends to Vienna.  That would really be horrible, but it has a very good chance of being true.

Personal biases weren't an issue in the Vienna mission; that wasn't the problem, so I'm not even going to deal with that here.

As to consistently applying decision-making criteria, there were no known decision-making criteria to apply consistently, so how could they do it, unless it was unbeknownst to the masses of us?  I'm pretty sure that even those who were socialized but not in the very inner circles wouldn't even know this kind of thing.  They just didn't like to be pinned down to anything, because when it came down to it they were the final word, period.  And input for the final word could come from  all sorts of places from any of the 15 odd missions on the board when they come together and decids on things.  Then you get the students and if some powerful and enough numbers of student groups concerned enough about issues that it could result in decisions or affect decisions.

Besides consistency is anathema in this type of work anyway.  You have to keep the "enemy" guessing or on his/her toes so s/he can't figure out what's going on.  For example, it's like when they used to change the meeting place every week from house to house under Communism and they had a whole system set up of how to communicate changes or whatever.  So the mission doesn't like to consistently do much of anything, other than what they absolutely have to do, like pay taxes and bills and things like that.  And it's not like they have regular assessments of the workers, so they only have decisions on things from time to time, meaning everything is sort of ad-hoc, and so it's bound to be inconsistent as is the decision-making criteria to go with it.

So the thing was that somehow there were several decisions to move me all based on decision making criteria against which there was nothing to compare to say whether they had been consistently applied or otherwise.  Well, there was one, exception to that.  They had me take a standardized mental health test before sending me back to the US.  I don't know the result, but they'd driven me to the point of being very stressed out, but I hadn't stopped functioning or anything; I kept going.   So they applied an external criteria, but they set me up for it, as they had evidently also done with two other wives before me.  So I guess that could be considered "consistently applying decision-making criteria", that is the criteria used to decide to send someone home for counseling that would serve to shape someone up to better be able to "contend with horses."

I'm not exactly sure, however, that I would be too proud of that particular usage of "consistently applying decision-making criteria," particularly for an Evangelical Christian mission.

As to providing timely feedback about decisions, this shouldn't have really applied to me.  The thing is that I went to Vienna to serve as the  secretary of the assistant director of the Vienna mission.  I should have stayed in that position for the duration of my stay with the mission.  It is conceivable, however, that if things had gone as I conceived them before I left the U.S., that I might have discussed working with the women's ministry team.  They wanted workers with a master's of divinity degree and I only had a graduate certificate, but they also had a lot of other particulars they looked for, so I'm not sure what would have happened there.  Also, what they were doing was training the wives of pastors, which was somewhat of a cultural thing, but in a way it bothered me as if the women couldn't have a ministry on their own.  I must admit I did have a great admiration for the Baptist woman in the city I lived in in Russia - an unregistered house church that was also a Christian library.  She lived alone, although she had a daughter who was away at college most of the time I was there, and she had services at  her place.  She'd preach or she'd give place to a man to preach if there was one.  Actually I was more conservative than she was in this, but on the other hand she was more conservative than I was regarding the head dress and all.  She was a wonderful woman, really.  

In a lot of ways I miss Russia, because I had friends there that understood me and I felt fulfilled there and I could use my gifts and talents.  I guess every place is different, though.

Finally, adequately explaining the basis for decisions.  The mission always gave a reason for its decisions.  In Vienna it was generally the H.R. director to do so, and in the U.S. it was the manager there that did it, but I never believed them.  How could I?  It was like blowing smoke in my eyes.  That's all it was.  So once again, you have an example of the level of trust I had in the mission leadership and how it started even early on, because if I couldn't believe their reason for sending me back to the U.S., then you know that I'd lost all faith in them period.  I was a lost cause.

So the thing was here, they had to really think that I believed their story as to why I was being sent back to the U.S.  And if I believed their story, then they really must have have thought that I was an idiot 1st class.  I mean really, you've got to be kidding!

First of all, I did not believe I had culture shock at all - I mean culture shock pertaining to problems living in Vienna, Austria.  The moment it came out of his mouth I knew it was a lie - straight out.  I mean a plain old fashioned schoolyard lie.  I don't care what the refereed article with its pretty x-y axis charts might indicate because they didn't apply to me, because the only thing wrong with me was that the mission was too busy making everything difficult for me and causing all kinds of unexplained stress that strangely enough was peculiar to the mission and only the mission (i.e., relations outside the mission were excluded), and for some reason other people at the mission did not share the same experience of stress as me.  (Although some said they had some stress, but not like what I was experiencing, although maybe some other's socialization bore some similarity - on a lesser scale.)  So I lived in my in my own little world with its own rules which were created by the mission and I could not make heads nor tails of, maybe like Alice in Wonderland, where rules could change at ttheir every whim, which of course could drive a person very crazy.  Maybe that sounds exaggerated, but early on when I'd be alone in my office and strange things would be happening with the computer that I knew were rigged, and then it always would be that only I would see or experience it so then if I went to show anyone it wouldn't happen.   Then it would be something else.  Everyone is just saying how you just have to take your time and not rush it, as if it's a cultural thing for these strange things to be happening on the computer.  Do you see what I mean?  That's just one example.  Then eventually, of course, you don't want to say anything, so you just do your work and if there's a problem you just put up with it and don't say anything at all. Of course, then, you have to deal with the stress of the problem.  And then they tell me I have culture shock. It must have taken a lot of gall for them to tell me that, I guess.

I was just absolutely in shock, of course for one thing - well, once it finally sunk in that it's for real and they actually are going to carry it out and they are not kidding around they are going to do this thing and send me back to the US.  I felt like I was living a nightmare. - This is how the Soviets treated Christians, to retrain them, or at least try, to stop being Christians and become atheists  So what was the mission wanting me to become?

But the thing was that I had had all my books at the office, so they had seen all my books on Eastern Europe, religion in the USSR, theology, European studies, etc., etc., so they so those and they could have thought that maybe I had some level of knowledge or insight.   Just because I was quiet, though, I guess, they somehow chose to hugely underestimate me to think that I really accepted the premist that what they said on the surface was really why they were sending me back to the USA.

Okay, so you have the Jeremiah 12:5 issue, you know, the thing I hate - the misuse of Scripture they did as a secret code sort of way of telling you want they mean.  Sort of like how your parents maybe used to speak pig Latin, but I think Scripture would be best not used that way.  Pardon me for being a purist.

Jeremiah 12:5

New King James Version (NKJV)

The Lord Answers Jeremiah

⁵ “If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you,
Then how can you contend with horses?
And if in the land of peace,
In which you trusted, they wearied you,
Then how will you do in the floodplain^[a] of the Jordan?

I didn't need their sending me to the US to prove I could contend with horses.  Later in my service I would even prove that I could contend with horses continuing to avoid socialization - in Czechoslovakia and Romania.  And I did just fine with the horses.

As to the footmen?  I think the footmen need to learn better hermeneutics (rules for studying the Bible) in order to know how to use the Scripture in a manner closer to what it was originally intended and not abuse it.

The thing was that they could make this verse into a self-fulfilling prophecy if they wanted.  Of course they could.  That would be no problem for them.  It would be very easy for them to create a situation such that I couldn't contend with horses... in their ministry, or possibly ever, if they messed me up good enough.  After what I went through with them I don't doubt that they would have had the capacity to do anything they would have had to, maybe to get me out of there.

So, I think when they saw me off to the U.S., they just saw me as not much more than as someone who knew German, had some Bible school background, and the rudimentary skills of a secretary.  I think they thought I'd bitten at the explanation they'd given me for why they were sending me to the U.S. Then I started having interactions with the U.S. office and they didn't know anything about what I was thinking that I was starting my trials of how to do this double life with keeping my old self secret.  And they just saw how I was being social and friendly and cooperating, etc.  And everything seemed okay to them.  So basically I just learned to keep more to myself - even more than before.  So, I think when it finally caught up with them that something wasn't right, they still didn't understand what, except that I wasn't accepting everything, I wasn't fulling socialized as they thought, but they didn't know how or why, or what happened.  and they freaked out, started staying away from me.  They didn't know what they'd done to me and they didn't know how I couldn't stand them.

***

This is another take at a big swath of my time with the mission.  Sometimes it helps to look at things from different positions to better understand it, and that's one way to look at part of my time with the mission.

I've got to go now, so we'll pick up here with the next post.



 

459. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 9 (Greenberg, pt. 2)

Picking up right where I left off on the same article as the last post, the very next paragraph discusses research into unfair performance appraisals on the job, at work.  The reason this would not be applicable to the Vienna mission is that I have no evidence that my performance had anything to do with how I was treated.  So first we would have to get them to even instate performance appraisals or else provide good reason for the moves in my various positions.  ("I say so" does not constitute a "good reason.  "I say so" falls under "abuse of power", see post 457, commenting on the same article.)

Since this seems like a long shot no matter how you cut it - it would take a work of God, for sure - we'll skip that paragraph and move on to see if anything else might be applicable.  In any case, it's too late for me anyway, although other people might very well benefit from having ethical well-run performance appraisals.  Emphasis on ethical and well-run.  Otherwise don't bother.  We don't need any more of those stupid misuses of Scripture, which this would be a typical place they'd use it in.

***

Focusing on the more specific context of performance appraisal, Greenberg (1986) asked a sample of managers from several industries to describe episodes of especially fair or unfair performance appraisals.... The five determinants loading highly on the procedural factor... were soliciting input prior to evaluation and using it, two-way communication during interviews, ability to challenge/rebut evaluations, rater familiarity with ratee's work, and consistent application of standards.  The distributive justice factor consistent of two-determinants theorized to reflect the fair allocation of organizational outcomes in a performance apprasal context. (p. 406)

 Again,.we have to make some adaptations to the mission setting.  And the mission didn't actually have performance appraisals.  At least they didn't as far as I ever knew; maybe I wasn't in a position long enough to experience it.  A little irony there.

This description really destroys any possible hope I might have had of there ever being a valid performance appraisal system set up at the Vienna mission (it still exists, although it's location, etc. is different now).  The mission might solicit input prior to the appraisal, but I I doubt it, because the mission is not an egalitarian system, and while socially it has egalitarian strains, the actual functioning is very clear-cut as to roles and responsibilities and they want it that way - for security.  As long as they have so many missions working together and they feel like they have to bow to all of them they're not going to change.  So for them to ask for input is to put you and your opinion on equal footing.  Now try that for the whole mission - for everyone's appraisals.  It's not going to happen.  It might happen to a select few or between immediate supervisors, I suppose.

The thing is that, like in my case, the mission has it's own logic, and it's not necessarily the logic of the normal world, so the mission might have a decision about you, like they did about me, that did or did not have any correlation to me and my causation - my actions.  So in those cases, they're not going to particularly going to want my input.  They're maybe not even going to want an appraisal in the usual sense of the word.  So then maybe it's better to just scrap the appraisal altogether and only use it from time to time as needed.

And even if they did have performance appraisals, what was the likelihood the communication was going to be two-way?  I think it depends some on the people involved.  If it were an instructor and the team leader meeting, there would be more two-way and mutual respect, I think.  But not so much perhaps with the support staff, which I was a part of.  In my case, I mean regarding just me personally, I am not sure what I would do, because I never was exactly in this position and I'm not sure how it would go. They never complained of my work, so I'm not so sure about that, although they certainly could have found something, you know, if you look hard enough there was bound to be something or the other that I didn't do quite fast enough or good enough or whatever..

And then there was the familiarity with my work.  My boss, the one I raised money to work with, whose secretary I was supposed to be in the first place, didn't really know how to work with a secretary and I don't really think he knew what I did to do an appraisal on me to save his soul.  I hope he knows by now, since he's the director now.  He'd better know what his secretary does now.  If not his secretary might want to go in and explain it to him.

Ability to challenge/rebut evaluations.  I think this would be on my end, because I would be the one interested in challenging/rebutting an evaluation.  So that means that the mission would have to be open enough that missionaries would be able to challenge aspects of their evaluations.  This is no small thing, because it could be tearing at the very fabric of the mission.  Maybe the mission actually wrote the evaluation for a specific purpose that you don't know (such as because of having a father working in SDI at Boeing and wanting you out of there like a hot potato as a risk to the mission).  So allow the challenge could be going against some instruction from deep in the bowels of the organization.  Now try the challenge/rebuttal routine.  Chances are you're not going to get anywhere and the only thing you're going to get is a headache and more stress than you ever wanted.  And your standing with the mission just dropped a notch for all the fuss of trying.

Consistent application of standards.  Standards are very funny things.  They seem to disappear down a black hole as soon as you step foot in the Vienna mission.  After that the only standards that matter are the ones engraved in the minds of "the leadership," whoever that may be.  I'm a little nebulous there because I think the  "who" is whoever is having the most guiding impact on you at the moment.  So, for example, when I was in my office doing the job I was sent to Vienna to do my boss was the "who" of the moment.  The other thing was, of course, that I was moved around so much.

Even though I was supposed to be working for my boss, all the moves and these significant events during my time with the mission were carried out by others.  So it seems that they must have had standards that should have also been taken into account.   After we'd run everyone down that we thought should be included and added them in, then we'd maybe be in a position to have an idea what the standards were that needed to be applied.  I would really like that, but I don't think they would.

***

In one of the first studies in this area, Alexander and Ruderman (1987) administered a questionnaire to approximately 2,800 employees of the U.S. federal government.  They found that indices of these employees' assessments of procedural justice were significantly related to such key measures as their trust in management, intention to turnover, evaluation of their supervisor, conflict/harmony,and job satisfaction. Moreover, with the exception of turnover intention, procedural fairness judgments  accounted for significantly more variance in these dependent measures than distributed justice.  Apparently, both procedural and distributive justice judgments are important, althought each may be predictive of different attitudes.  This idea is consistent with Tyler's (1984) research on defendants' evaluations of their courtroom experiences.  Findings from this research revealed that procedural justice was strongly associated with defendants' attitudes toward the court  system, wheras distributive justice was strongly associated with defendants' satisfaction with verdicts... Extrapolating from such findings, Lind and Tyler (1988: 179) conclude that "procedural justice has especially strong effects on attitudes about institutions or authorities as opposed to the attitudes about the specific outcome in question." (p. 406)

Procedural justice we've already established is out the window as a hopeless case - as a general issue.

I've discussed trust some, I think, elsewhere, but it's been a long time.  It should be quite clear that I didn't trust the management.  They started off all wrong with me from the very beginning.   They just shouldn't have started with all this B.S., I don't care if it was for what they might have thought was socialization or if it was to drive me out of there because of my dad.  But as soon as I arrived on one hand I got some overwhelming welcoming that all but blew  me over that I thought was excessive so much as to be suspicious, especially when combined with me just spending week after week with a software manual as work to occupy me, and then a few other things besides to throw me off, like them continuing to insist that I live with the other secretary when I'd said I want to live alone.

So I wasn't sure what to make of the early things so I took a wait and see approach, doing what I'm supposed to do, but otherwise mostly observing to try to figure what's going on.  So even that was the beginning of not quite trusting the mission because something didn't seem quite right, but I wasn't really sure yet.  That was like the first 2-3 months.  After that the stress started builing up more and more as I continued to not give in and the stressors increased at work.  Needless to say the trust factor took a nose-dive as well. 

Evaluation of their supervisor.  My supervisors varied with the moves.  Fortunately, even though I moved positions 5 times, I only had 3 bosses.  My boss that I was supposed to have the whole time, the one that I had for 3 of the moves was nice.  He seemed uncertain, being new in the position himself.  Like I said before, he didn't know my job like he should have, but seeing he was new in his job there's a learning curve, so his boss's secretary was taking care of me if there were any issues I needed help with.  Mostly I did pretty basic secretarial stuff anyway, so it wasn't a difficult position no matter how you look at it.  Eventually there were times when it was busy, but it wasn't difficult, so it was like grunt work for me.

Conflict/harmony.  I'm not sure if there were any conflicts in the mission.  Generally everyone got along.  The thing was that we had to get along because of the ministry and we had to trust each other (I'm speaking sort of from the mission's stand point now) for security's sake.  If there was bickering or disagreement in the group I think the mission might have tried to intervene to find out what the problem was to resolve it because it wouldn't have wanted something like that to continue or, heaven forbid, spread.  So it was like living in Nirvana or something when you were in the mission because of the suppression of all these kinds of conflicts or any negativity to speak of.  If you had these kinds of thoughts you should just keep them to yourself because the mission wouldn't tolerate them.

This does raise a dilemma, however, if there really is a problem that needs addressing, but according to how this system is set up no matter how urgent or vital it won't get addressed (well, maybe a fire or a heart attack or something like that).  That's because it will just get quelched with all the rest of the negativity trivial or otherwise.  So there goes your means of redress right out the window, because the mission won't allow any negativity and your legitimate complaint falls within the category of negativity that should be quelched.

Job satisfaction.  I already just dealt with this one very recently.

***

The self-interest model (earlier referred to as the "instrumental perspective," (Tyler, 1987a; 333) suggests that people seek control over processes because they are concerned with their own outcomes. (p. 407-408)

I think that I must be a freak of nature because of all the missionaries that were working at the Vienna mission I apparently was the only one that was concerned with "my own outcomes."  and I sought control over processes.  I think that's maybe a little bit of the result of what happened, although that's not maybe  necessarily why.  But the thing is that given a lack of trust in an organization, that from my perspective appeared to want to completely change my whole way of thinking, I responded with a drive "to control processes" to hope for some influence on the outcomes.

At least that's how it's supposed to work, but in the mixed up world of the Vienna mission, I generally gave up expecting anything one way or the other.

***

In that study it was found that decision fairness was more strongly associated with the extent to which the decision represented was more strongly associated with the extent to which the decision represented the interests of all group members than the extent which it favored themselves.  Clearly, concern about the group good was an important element of fairness, part of the general notion that justice concerns are linked to group membership (Tyler & Lind, in press). (p. 409)

Certainly there were social norms, but these were norms not that just naturally evolved, but that were dictated from on high (or from deep inside - however you want to look at it).  Of course there were some things that evolved, like how they celebrate birthdays, but that's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about the things that are the meat and bones and that that aren't the types of things that mission was about to just let evolve by chance.  I really thing there was some social engineering there, but call it whatever you want, the mission, as I've said before, was more like a oligarchy than anything - like the Soviet Union.  The Board was at least if not more secretive and all-powerful  in relation to us as the as the Soviet Presidium was to the USSR.

So as far as group good was concerned, I really didn't have a very clear idea what the group good was.  I mean I guess I knew it was not in the group's best interests to go to Poland handing out Gospel tracks with the street address of the mission in them.  Actually, I knew that before I even came so I didn't need any socialization to tell me that.  But the group itself doesn't really decide it's own interests.  The department heads to have input into some decisions, logistical, etc. but generally, we're the sheep just shuffled around told what to do where, and when and how and with whom, and sometimes why.

I'm describing this from my perspective, you understand, so it may not be the same for everyone.

***

Greenberg (1986b) found that people believe that the outcomes resulting from unfair procedures are themselves unfair, but only when those outcomes are trivial; more beneficial outcomes were believed to be fair regardless of the fairness of the procedure. (p. 408)

So in Vienna there weren't actually outcomes, at least not the usual types of outcomes you'd expect at a job.  If you were to use anything at all as outcomes it would have to be opportunities for ministry.  If you look at it this way, you'd expect that that a positive outcome would be something like more opportunities for ministry and a negative outcome would lead to lesser opportunity.  If you look at it that way, then it is possible to see a trend pattern during my mission experience.  It goes like this (in brief):


I arrive in Vienna and I am taken aback at what I find at the mission so I go in a look and see mode while a work but don't really express my thoughts too much.  (But I'm getting involved in the Austrian church, have guests from the States visit, etc.)  Strange problems at work mount and I'm having more and more stress at work.  Leading to my return to the U.S.

I move to another office not right next to my boss for some reason that I don't understand.  I think this is a down grade.  It's a negative outcome.

This is negative outcome, but it's not exactly clear what I've done and this move has totally and forever destroyed my trust in the mission.  It's the absolute worst move they could have made.

I start part time work as receptionist in the U.S. office. This is still part of the negative outcome because I am exiled from my position and it is definitely a downgrade.

I fill in for the U.S. manager's secretary while she's on maternaty leave.  This is a bit of an upgrade.  They're testing me out I think to see if I'm okay to come back to Vienna.  So it's a positive outcome from where I was but it's still a negative outcome from where I'm supposed to be.

Then I finally return to Vienna to my old position.  This is a a positive outcome, but it's actually right where I started, so it's not really a positive outcome either.

Finally, the last move is to the receptionist position, where I stay until I leave.  That's a negative outcome and the final outcome as far as positions are concerned.

I never had control over any of these outcomes at all.  They were decided irregardless of anything I did or didn't do.  I wasn't cantankerous.  I did my work well.  I don't know.  But that's how they treated me.  And that's how they ruined my life, and that's just the surface, believe me.

So how can this be fair?  Is there a way under heaven that anyone in their right mind could possibly view this as being just, equitable, or whatever you want to call it?  Where is the procedure?  This passage speaks about the fairness of the procedure but I don't even have a clue what the procedure is because everything is done behind closed doors.  "That's the way things are dong around here."  What do you think?  Is that a satisfactory answer?

***

This article has a lot more good material in it, but it's really late not and I'd better head off and get some Zzzz's.

Thanks for stopping by.  This isn't the life I would have chosen, but God has given me the grace and strength to make it through some of these things.  And now I'm sick and have a hard time having much of a life so it's working out to finally work on this.

458. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 8 (Greenberg, pt. 1)

I'm feeling crummy today.  I'm not sure why, but I am.  I don't have stamina, and my legs start bothering me - maybe I need to do more exercises.  But I'm also having some nausea.  If it continues I'll probably have to see my primary care doctor, I guess.  I just got blood tests this morning, though, because they have to monitor me because of a biological medicine I'm on for rheumatoid arthritis.  I don't know that it necessarily has anything to do with that, but maybe the blood tests could show something.  All I know is I don't feel very well.  I feel better being seated or laying down.  Then I don't feel so bad.  Exce't my legs still bother me or sometimes my back hurts.  Speaking of which... yesterday I just realized I had gone for a full week without changing my Fentanyl patch!!! I'm supposed to change it every 3 days.  There was a time when it kept falling off and I was so afraid that they were going to think I was abusing them (it's a narcotic) for changing them too often.  I have gone for 4 or once I think maybe 5 days, but not 7, that's too much.  So you can tell I really am not abusing it anyway!

What a tedious life I live now.  I'm resorting back to my life as a toddler when mom said for the year when I was 2-3 and we were living at dad's mom's house in this real upscale neighborhood where the houses were far apart and I didn't have any friends to play with that she felt sorry for me but I was very good at just playing by myself.  So here I am again.  I wouldn't be here by choice, but health puts us in strange situations, doesn't it, and I can't complain, because even now I can look over my shoulder and there's a lake out the window, so it's not so bad, is it?

It is lonely though.  That it is.  Everyone says that no man is an island, but sometimes I feel like I am, not that I want to be. 

The next text is:

Greenberg, Jerald. (1990). Organizational Justice: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Journal of Management, 16(2), 399-432.

***

Historically, the equity theory of Adams... has been given the greatest attention by organizational scientests in issues of justice... This theory claims that people compare the ratios of their own perceived work outcomes (i.e., rewards) to their own perceived work inputs (i.e., contributions) to the corresponding ratios of a comparison other (e.g., a co-worker). (p. 400)

First of all, as I've said before, since this wasn't a regular place of employment, the Vienna mission didn't dole out the same kind of rewards and the like as you'd find back home on the job.  So you have to adjust it to the context at hand.  Since new missionaries came in at various times it was, I think, hard for them to know if they were progressing on schedule or not because they didn't really have a cohort to compare themselves to.  But once you were socialized then I think you more or less did.  You could compare yourself to others in your department, for example.  But I don't think this kind of thing was really encouraged because there had to be such a high level of trust and camaraderie that to think like that would tear that all down.  So I doubt the mission would put up with that kind of thing.  I wouldn't be surprised though if there was some of this fostering underneath the surface here and there in the mission.  It would be the kind of thing where a certain individual was given a choice assignment when another person thought s/he would get it and really wanted it.  That kind of thing.  "Choice," of course, is all relative, and I couldn't even begin to tell you what that might be, just whatever that person thought it was.

Where this relates to me in the mission, for one thing, is that there would be no way for me to know that it was unusual to have been moved around so much from position to position except in comparison to everyone else... and I mean EVERYONE else.  Absolutely everyone.  From the director down to the gardener.  I don't care who you are, no one absolutely no one except me got moved around as much as me.  There was one girl that got moved around one time and she wasn't even a missionary and I got moved around 5 times.  So that's equity theory for you.  Now sit back and think really hard, do you think that I felt like I was treated with any equity by the Vienna mission those two years that I was with them?

If you guessed no, you are correct.  Bingo.  You're catching on.

***

Individuals are theorized to adjust theor own or the comparison other's actual or perceived inputs or outcomes in order to change unpleasant inequitable states to more pleasant ones... These reactions may be classified as being either behavioral... or psychological... (p. 400-401)

The thing with this was I wasn't sure of the causes of the inequitable states.  It's a lot easier to make adjustments when you know what the causes are.  In normal work situations you might have a bad work review or something of that nature and you're told up front what the issue is or if you applied for an inside job and didn't get it you might be able to find out why you didn't get it.  But in my case it was not so easy.

And I didn't think I had really done anything wrong.  They wanted my heart and soul and that was the theme I sort of came away with from those two years and felt I couldn't give them because I thought they would give me theirs in return and for being a Christian mission, despite their polished exterior they could be a monster inside.  So short of giving them my heart and soul, what could I do, sort of play along, which is what I ended out doing.  But it still didn't work, because they still moved me around.

If the issue ultimately was my dad (and his work in Star Wars at Boeing), then there wasn't anything I could have done to right things, no matter what I did.

***

Research using simulated legal decisions consistently has found that verdicts resulting from procedures offering disputants process control were perceived as fairer and were better accepted than identical decisions resulting from procedures that denied process control (e.g., Walker, Lind, & Thibaut, 1979)

As additional research was conducted on this phenonomenon (for reviews, see Lind & Tyler, 1988, 1988; Tyler, 1987), it became clear that this finding was reflective of a more general tendency across a variety of settings for procedures granting control over the process of outcome attainment to be perceived as fairer than procesures that deny process control... (p.403)

This is the same kind of logic that kept me from wanting to trust the Vienna mission as far as any kind of grievance may have been concerned.  I didn't see any possibility for this kind of "process control" - not one iota of it at all.  Any semblance of it would have been simply a mockery of the term, with no real resemblance to the real thing.  So you can see how much faith I had in the mission, my sending mission, and all the leadership involved.  That really does pretty well give you an idea of where my faith in them was.

***

Whereas Thibaut & Walker... emphasized the importance of process control, the approach to procedural justice offered by Leventhal focused on other aspects of procedural justice.  Specifically, Leventhal postulated that various procedural elements (e.g., the selection of decision-makers, setting ground rules for evaluating potential rewards, methods of gathering information, procedures for defining the decision process, procedures for appeals, safeguards against abuse of power, and the availability of change mechanism) are used to evaluate the fairness of outcome-distribution procedures.  The fairness of the procedures, he asserted, is evaluated relative to their meeting several criteria: namely, the extent to which they suppress bias, create consistent allocations, rely on accurate information, are correctable, represent the concerns of all recipients, and are based on prevailing moral and ethical standards.

So all of these things describe what was wrong at the Vienna mission in my opinion.  But I have to explain myself, because otherwise it might not be on the surface immediately evident.

Well the selection of decision-makers hardly counts because it's just the people in the highest positions.  People pretty much stayed in their positions, so it was just the obvious people, the director and assistant director, department heads, the Board, the H.R. department.  So I'm not even going to deal with that one.  The only thing there is that why are they having U.S. military chaplains run the H.R. department?  I thought that was pretty darn strange.  And that was an important issue for me because that could have affect regarding my dad's work.  So that does lose some neutrality for me.  If I need to feel like they were going to come up with fair decisions regarding my treatment, they (both of the chaplains/H.R. staff) would have to be taken off the team to make decisions about me.

But you know if they do that then what's going to happen is that the rest of the team that's left deciding my fate are going to sneak out the back door to consult with them anyway to know what to do with me.  Sure, they're not stupid!  These guys they chitchat in the hall all the time and my boss and his boss are just down the hall from them on the 3rd floor! 

Most of these things are irrelevant, so I'm skipping them.

Procedures for appeals.  This should have been in place long before I came to Vienna.  It's really attrocious that it wasn't.  I understand that it might have been a bit different with all of the missions involved, but there should have been some kind of a policy for how it started at the mission and when the sending mission got involved if it did.  It's attrocious that there wasn't such a thing in place, but it's just along the same lines as not having a functional staff manual.  I don't care what your asinine socialization says.  The missionaries have rights too.  So there should be a functioning staff manual that has in it clearly spelled out the procedures for appeals.

And here's my favorite: safeguards against abuse of power.  The constitution of the mission needs to have a section in it that includes a section on the safeguards of the abuse of power.  Maybe not.  Unfortunately, the kind of abuse of power I experience in the mission is a slippery abuse of power and the only way it's going to get better is for people to do something - the missionaries, supporters, churchers, whoever.

On the outside it doesn't look like abuse of power.  If you go to a meeting it doesn't look like abuse of power.  But it's all encompassing to those who work there and if you just dare to cross it you'll soon find out what abuse of power looks like.  If you stay in the good graces it's very nice, otherwise, and you can't see a thing.  Everything looks normal.  It might be, though, that those who were there when I was and saw how I was treated saw a glimpse of what the Mission was capable of.  But everyone saw different pieces of how I was treated and heard different things about it - maybe the leadership even had an official story about me, explanation for my departure.  So I expect everyone came to difference conclusions, and I was probably a bit of an enigma.  But the thing was that how they had treated me was, in my opinion, an abuse of power.  Sure I was in a foreign country away from where there would be witnesses I knew to verify what they did to me.  But just because I am there does not give them liberties to treat me like that.  Does not give them liberties to treat anyone like that.  They treat everyone like that, it's just that others give in.  That's an abuse of power if you ask me.

You can't say - "Hah, now there are no witnesses that this person knows so we can treat him/her however we want to get him/her to become the way we want to be!"  That is abuse of power, plain and simple and that is what the Vienna mission did to me and I think it did it to everyone, really in its socialization.  That's part of what it banks on for that process.  It's not only being in a foreign country - it's not having witnesses; no one will believe you.  It's you all alone against the big mission.  Even couple and families aren't together all day and it may be hard to explain to each other what they are experiencing.

But the other thing is the values issue, if people are required to submit total faith and be completely open to being counseled according to the ways of the mission this leaves a huge opening for the possibility of the abuse of power and I am in no certain terms satisfied that there are any safeguards to protect against the abuse of said powers.  The mission abused Scripture left and right - such as the use of Jeremiah 12:5 (which I have recently been referring to, that they used with me before sending me back to the US for counseling 5 months into my term with them), so we know that Scripture was not a good safeguard for them because they would have been just as likely to twist and turn it however they wanted to their own end.  And these are theologians, I'm talking about, but they believed in ends justifies the means and this was one aspect of that philosophy in action.

I never saw the heart of the mission because I refused to accept their beliefs.  That's the part of me that I worked hard to keep secret, that if they only knew  all the things I disagree with them on they would have had me shot at sunset, so to speak.  So they didn't know my thoughts, but they weren't there thoughts.

***

However, given the general managerial context of the study, it was not surprising that several additional principles emerged.  For example, rules regarding, "providing adequate information," and "assigning challenging and meaningful work" were among those principles reported by Sheppard and Lewicki's respondents, but which were not contained in earlier writings on justice. (p. 405)

Generally speaking, I don't remember there being a real problem with "providing adequate information."  I always had enough information.  And where there wasn't an incredible lot of information to go on, that was generally in a situation where I had some leeway to set some things up on my on to organize offices and the like.  The one time where this could possibly be an issue if you count the time before I had arrived in Vienna and I asked them which word processor they used so that I could take a class in it before I came to learn it (this was in the '80s and I didn't know all the software).  Then when I arrived in Vienna they set me up with a manual to learn the program and that's what I did for a few weeks at least.

However, "assigning challenging and meaningful work" is most defnitely a hot button issue.  I was supposed to be the secretary of the assistant director, and I would say that I was fully functioning in that position maybe 6 months of the 24 months I was with the mission.  The rest of the time was basically in this category.  And my supporters were paying for it.  How do you think I felt.  Well I kept up a sunny disposition and didn't let on but it could feel like I was a joker or something.  Who was I fooling, smiling when all this is happening?  And the mission believed me?  My parents even believed me.  So you can guess how good of an actress I was, right?

I mean, really, imagine this.  I take a women's trip to Vienna, finally.  So now they know I can teach and they've seen me several times in Czechoslavia, so they finally see a little bit of what I can do.  Then my parents come - sometimes I think they only sent me on the women's ministry trip because my parents were coming, so they could show them I was getting ministry opportunity.

Then practically as soon as they leave I'm ushered down to the receptionist position.  Like it was all a show!  How do you think I feel?  I'm not stupid after all.  I know what's going on.  Remember I'm holding on to my old values and I don't agree with the mission's ways like everyone else anyway.  So I can still think for myself.  I just can't show it.  So I have to do the thinking at home in my apartment where no one can see me.

I'm a fool.  Really, that was my position in the mission.  How can anyone not think that I could not have noticed this and somehow had to find a way to live with it or accept it or something.  I would have hoped that those who knew me knew me well enough that they would have seen that doing that kind of work was antithetical to what I was capable of.  The problem was that my parents didn't believe me that I had worked so hard to keep my identity intact.

[I'm writing this a couple days later.  The problem regarding my parents believing me was two-fold.  First of all, I couldn't express myself as clearly as I can with the help of these articles that are helping me understand what was happening even more than I did at the time.  I mean, I did have some very specific consciousness of what I was doing but there was a huge amount of gray area where everything was a jumble and I was doing my best to make my way through the ambiguity and all.  So if I couldn't understand it that well, how could I explain it to others?  So that was a problem.

But the other issue was dad's work.  There were, I think different ways how dad's work may have come in, and as soon as I was out of the way and not affecting dad's work any more, dad would have been glad to point the finger at me as being the problem to make sure that he's off the hook maybe, so that there couldn't possibly be any link to his work as having caused my problems.  (But I came back so weak anyway that he hardly needed to worry about that one; I was hardly a threat to him at that point.)

 On the surface he made it look like he saw this kind of thing all the time - how I was treated by the mission - and it was just a failure of nervous breakdown  or the like, and he lost a lot of respect for me from that.  Weakness was a big deal in his family, from his father's ingraining it in him and he passed this value on at least subconsciously this way to us kids as adults.  on the other hand, I lost respect for him when I saw him doing this - responding to me in this way. Mom had said to me as a teenager that dad cared what people thought and now I was feeling the brunt of it, understood what she meant.  On the other hand, he never abandoned me, but still, this type of thing wasn't good either, and it's messed up the family too.  My one brother needs anger counseling but if he sees it as a weakness like this, he'd never in a million years get it, but that's how  mom ended out getting emotionally and verbally abused.  My other brother is controlling with his boys, but is certainly a lot better.  There are lots of things that are worse than being weak, and my situation in Vienna was a particular situation that was unique especially and, honestly, I've been tested at universities up and down the East coast in recent years, despite having conditions that often have comorbidities with things like depression and all and I've been told that they can't find anything wrong with me or they pick at straws digging for things.  So I'm emotionally healthy and that situation in Vienna was because of the stress they put me under and I pulled myself together and somehow managed to live a double life keeping my values.  So that should tell you something that I'm not a complete psycho or something.  Then a year after leaving the mission I started on my Masters and not long after that I went to live in Siberia, where I lived for several years.



But despite the fact that dad had labeled me (at least in part) a failure didn't change my values , because I didn't think that that was how people should be judged and it didn't change my tune as far as what I knew happened in Vienna, even if I had trouble expressing it to others.  So this must be what babies feel like when they can't express themselves.  It's really a terrible feeling.  And when I came home from Vienna and I realized I was completely misunderstood by everyone I felt like a complete stranger there.  But no one could fathom it.  My family might have sensed I was a bit changed, but they probably thought I'd get over it or something.  This is what I mean when I say my parents didn't believe me about keeping my identity intact.  It's because they would have had to appreciate the attrocities of how the mission treated me, and I was having trouble explaining them, and same with the extent of the extent of the emotional aspects of what was going on, as well as the relations to dad's work, which dad may not have known about.] 

 

***

I'm going to end here.  This article is going to have a lot more to comment on too.

457. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 7 (O'Driscoll & Beehr, pt. 1)

This next article is a quantitative research study carried out in the U.S. and New Zealand.

O'Driscoll, Michael P. and Beehr, Terry A. (1994). Supervisor behaviors, role stressors and uncertainty as predictors of personal outcomes for subordinates. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15, 141-155.

***

Two assumptions underlying the present study are (a) that one important realm of influence which control is the degree of uncertainty personnel have to contend with in their work environment, and (b) that uncertainty is a predictor of work-related effect, strain and behavior intentions.  We argue that, through their interactions with subordinates, supervisors may reduce or, alternatively, exacerbate the amount of uncertainty confronted by employees within an organization.  Supervisors' behavior may be quite critical for alleviating or increasing the ambiguity and unpredictability which subordinates feel about their job tasks, about managemenet, and about the social and political dynamics of the organization. (p. 141-142)

Bingo!  And if you just happen to be working for the Vienna mission, where ambiguity in the work place is a standard operating procedure - particularly during the socialization process, but not even completely isolated to that initial period of the worker's time with the mission.  It's just that at the beginning it's heaped on him/her and s/he is taken by surprise and doesn't have the coping skills yet to deal with it and hasn't come to grips with it yet.  Because half the battle is coming to grips with it; that is, you have to sort of decide agree to live in/with this ambiguity, which means that you aren't the one pulling the shots and you don't really know what's going on.  So you're taking a huge Kierkegaardean leap of faith and you have to really believe that the mission is on the straight, has your best interest in mind, is doing what it says it is doing, etc., because you're laying your life on the line that it is doing these things.  Literally, because you're going behind the lines into Communist countries doing church work and they might even think you're spies if they find out you're doing church work.  So that's pretty serious. 

But when I arrived in Vienna and the ambiguity I first face wasn't just from my "Supervisors' behavior." At least not directly and openly from his behavior.  But management can give other orders that don't come directly from them that cause ambiguity also, and I'm pretty certain that the computer problems and some of the other problems at work may have been of that nature.  But then I'm not sure how they decided how to "socialize" me, it may have been by committee, but that's still management and my supervisor, who was the assistant director of the mission, most certainly would have been involved in the process, no matter how unassuming he could come off.

Even things like at the end when I was working at the reception desk and I was supposed to keep track of who was in the building so I knew how to route calls or take messages, etc.  And people would NOT tell me when they left no matter how many times I asked them to do so.  This was deliberate and created a sense of ambiguity for me because it made me feel uncertain about my status in the organization and unrespected.  This wasn't done by the supervisor, but the organization was such an in sync organism that things didn't always need to come from the supervisor or management, and then this could free up the management and leadership from having to take any responsibility for doing the dirty work, which, of course, was a very convenient thing. 

All I can say is that I have never ever worked anywhere where there has been so much ambiguity, including in Siberia or Seoul, S. Korea.  That's part of why I had to do these studies with these articles because my mind was such a muddle about what happened but my life was so destroyed by those two years with the mission, and it was incredibly worse than anything Russia did to me.  It's like the saying that the American Jews graffitied on our mission working with Soviet Jews in the '80s in the U.S.: "The Nazis killed Jews bodies, but you are killing Jews souls."  Of course, we didn't see it as killing Jews souls, but the comparison was graffic, and you could see how from their standpoint they could feel that way.  So for me, the Vienna mission tried to kill my soul, but Russia tried to kill me.  I'm not exactly sure Russia tried to kill me, but I think it came pretty close because I was in pretty bad shape in their hospital there were some pretty shady things there that went on and no one knew I was there except my then husband. (Later believers from the house church I was going to ran me down, but it was after the worst was over.)  

The ambiguity in the Vienna mission was a given and everybody had a certain amount of it and it was just something you just had to get used to, but not like what I went through.  What I went through was over the top and to say it was intended as training for me to be able to contend with horses (Jer. 12:5) was beyond believability.  There is no way that what they put me through could train me for anything other than trying to get me out of there or having a breakdown (if I won't get out of there on my own free will).  And, of course, the other thing, is that they would have been interested in protecting my father, so they would have had that extra directive (the word is used intentionally - remember the H.R. staff are U.S. reserve chaplains, and one of the lead missions takes money from the C.I.A. and my father had an intelligence aspect of his job as SDI program manager at Boeing) to make sure I'm in a position that keeps dad safe.  My personality and background, values included, would not have made this very easy. 

So here we are back at my dad again.  It's hard to deny that my treatment by the mission was extraordinary and everyone knew it.   And when I started to get rumors, people telling me about different positions, possibilities of this or that thing going to happen that I might be a part of, I didn't know whether to believe it.  That's because the ambiguity was too much and I was too much on the outs so I did hope some, but I mostly chose not to act on these things.  This was ambiguity.  A very clear example of what I mean, but it was all the time and this is just one thing. 

***

Similarly, role conflict has been shown to be related to unfavorable personal outcomes, although typically the association is not as strong as for ambiguity. (p. 143)

There was some role conflict, if you will recall (if you have been reading along, that is), but even that involved some ambiguity because it wasn't out and out role conflict.  That is, my boss didn't outright say that I had to stop attending the Austrian church, for example or being told by H.R. that galavanting about on my own (such as taking the Spanish cooking class) was prohibited for staff to do.  Nothing was that straightforward or cleancut.  That would be too easy.  Rather, it was left to the world of ambiguity and social pressures and tips from the inner sanctum if one appeared ready and in the right spirit to learn more about the desires of the leadership.  Otherwise, the ambiguity remained.

There were, of course, roles that missionaries at the mission had to balance, such as family roles and responsibilities in the mission.  Those would be the main roles of this type, I think.  This includes issues around children and their schooling.  But the mission had taken this into account and this wasn't so much the issue that I'm talking about.  (Part of how this was dealt with, incidently, was that secretaries worked with their boss's kids and befriended their lonely homebound wives that might be jealous of them (the secretaries) spending all the time with their husband all day at work.  At least this is how it was explained to me.)

So then what it comes down to is other types of roles.  In fact, it might just only be my external roles to the mission because I dared to have roles outside the mission.  It is possible that I wasn't the only person that had ever had the problem of external role conflict that became a problem and led to some ambiguity, but I'm pretty certain that I'm the only one that stuck with it so long.

These were the preconditions that led to me having the role conflicts:

1) being assigned a position (secretary) that I was not satisfied with and felt overqualified for,
2) knowing the local language, at least somewhat
3) having Bible school training and some missions background
4) having previously spent 2 months (with a mission and also a few days with a university) in the city)

There was at least one other female staff that I think could have been a candidate for role conflict, but I'm not sure if she had or not experienced it because she had already been there so much longer than I and I didn't have any chance to really discuss this with her.

The thing, then, is that all these things had to converge together.  Then I felt this sort of ambiguous sense that there was a disapproval, but there was a disapproval for everything about me it seemed.

And then, of course, I'm told I have culture shock.  Is that their ultimate disapproval?  How ambiguous is that?  And all the time I'd been doing just great at the Austrian church and I much preferred being with the Austians over the Americans.  At least the Austrians made sense.  Let's just say I much prefer the Austrian and Russian horses to the American footmen (Jer. 12:5 - the verse the H.R. director/U.S. reserve military chaplain used in his send off back to America for counseling for "culture shock").

***

[O]ne proposition examined in the present research was that role ambiguity and conflict are perceived environmental stressors which induce uncertainty in a person about the performance of tasks of about the outcomes that are dependent upon successful task performance. (p. 143)

This is not as clearcut as it might seem.  For me in the Vienna mission, a good part of the problem was that I was constantly being moved about, so it was difficult to think that I was really leaving a mark on the mission.  And from the very beginning I was doing trivial things that were way beneath what I could have been doing.  Even just volunteering at a research center I was making more of a mark than what I was doing there in a two year mission supported term.  It was degrading.  And I felt absolutely demeaned.  That's on the macro level.

On the micro level I knew I was doing what I was supposed to do to the best of my ability and that they were pleased with it.  But at the same time, I also knew that the micro level was often - but not always grunt work.  At the very beginning what I was doing was absolutely nonessential and I might as well have not been there.  There was no good purpose in my being there unless they were seeing it as being for my socialization.

But a lot of the time I felt like it was just a test to see how I would do and they might not even care that much.  For example, when I was sent to the receptionist desk.  I had so much time on my hands it was ridiculous so I decided to re-organize the supply and ordering system, which I didn't have to do.  I guess they appreciated it, but it was sort of a joke too, because they just had me their as a retainer biding time until I left and that was all. 

There never was a benchmark or anything by which to determine if you had successfully completed a task; it wasn't that kind of place anyway and I don't know if anyone had that luxury.  But in my case I never even knew if successful task completion was what they were really after, or if it was something else and the task was just a ploy to get to something else that they were really after.  That's how it felt, but it was a moving target, so that I can't say that it was always the same.  And there you get more ambiguity. 

Can you begin to imagine how it could have been hell on earth and how hard it would have been to maintain one's sanity in this kind of context?  It was wild.  And to explain it is just... it's almost beyond words.  You had to be me living it, really.  I don't know how else to say it.

***

So now we get to the results of this study and here is one finding.

In particular, there were strong indications that role ambiguity was closely related to job dissatisfation and to psychological strain, while role conflict was associated with strain and with turnover intentions.  Uncertainty appeared to be directly connected with lack of job satisfaction, rather than with the two other outcomes variables. (p. 151)

So there you have it in black and white.  As some might say, it's not rocket science, no?  I mean it's not like you should be shocked out of your pants to learn this truth.  It's not like learning for the first time that the earth revolves around the sun or something, right?  Well, I mean, it might just solidify something you had a hunch about but now it's more certain, like a truth.  Of course, the way with research studies is that they have to study it in other settings, with other populations and other researchers have to confirm it, etc., etc. but you know what I mean. 

Was I happy in Vienna?  Well, I put on a good show, for sure, but I've been a wreck ever since I left there because they ruined me and inside I was anything but happy.  I was scared spitless.  More than anything else I was afraid of them.  But there was also a good dose of anger in there, and hurt, grieving because this was my career that I just buried somewhere and didn't deal with for 2 years till I came home to the States for good.

So it's clear I had job dissatisfaction, and for good reason, for all the times they moved me around - and they didn't treat anyone else that way, and I'm not stupid, so anyone in their right mind would have job dissatisfaction.  I had so much psychological strain it was a miracle I didn't come home in a straight jacket and that just testifies to my fortitude and scrappiness for finding a way to survive in that social climate.  So you just know that I am a turnover intention just waiting to happen because I meet all the criteria left and right and it's a wonder it didn't happen sooner except I was afraid to leave my term early.  So when my two year term was up you bet your booties my turnover intention was not just an intention it was a fact and it happened right on schedule at the end of my two years.

It turns out I fit the description perfectly.

I would also like to say that the mission leadership was pretty stupid for thinking that I might be happy working with them after how they treated me.  They didn't know who they were dealing with it seems.

***

That's the end of this article.  It's another pretty emotional one.  It looks like this file seems to be full of these kinds of articles.  They touch on subjects that really hit home and help me describe what happened when I was in Vienna.  It's these aspects that won't be picked up in a lot of other places because I was so scared to even write about my feelings realy.  The mission had me that terrified. 

No one should have to go through that.  And the worst thing is that these were Christians, Christian leaders.  So it has undermined my faith in the Christian church.  It hasn't undermined my faith in God though, just the Church.

You know this isn't the kind of thing I'd just make up or something.  I hope you understand that.   It's my real life.  It's hard on the Internet, and with me using a pseudonym it doesn't help.  I'm not ready to use my real name yet.  I'm afraid I'm going to have a lot of enemies bombarding me and eventually I guess I might have to get ready for that, but I'm not ready yet.

456. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 6 (Furby, pt. 3)

Yesterday I wrote an e-mail to one of my brothers, the one whose apartment I lived in a few years ago.  I'd been trying to pen letters to go with the cards I bought at the Christian bookstore I finally took the effort to run down here (so I knew where to find good cards).  I was really having a tough time, just like with the Easter cards, which I sent everyone but my brothers.  That was really horrible because it was the first Easter since mom's death and mom died just before Easter.  So to not send cards to my brothers was not good.  But I couldn't figure out what to say, just like now.  So I finally got up the courage to send an e-mail trying to explain it to the one brother I thought I had the most courage to write to and he hasn't responded. 

How can it be that I can't write the the family members closest to me?  It's so awful and it's not how I wan't it to be, but they'll never believe me.  All the stuff I'm writing here they'll just tear to pieces.  It might even be almost like being in Vienna again.  Mom believed me I think, but that was because dad had been dead already a few years.  Otherwise he would have blown it away too, just like my brothers, so my brothers are being true to what my dad would say.  And the thing is that it's political.  For me to overcome it I would have to come home from Russia go through the education program and straight to work.  And that's the only way.  Then dad would believe me that the Austria stuff might have been political and that there might have been some funny business going on there. 

Beyond that I was on my own and dad wasn't going to believe me and dad was going to make sure that everyone saw things his way.  So if I wanted anyone to see things my way, I was going to have to leave his circle of influence.  It's funny but of family the people we did understand me were his mom and also an cousin of his, both of whom are dead now.  So one was a cousin older than him and another was wise in the world in academic circles and the like and didn't live nearby.  Now I live far from the family, so I don't know too much what they think of me at this point.  It's hard to tell.  There's not much I can do about it.  I really wanted to make a trip back home last summer but health precluded that and I have a feeling I may well be stuck here for the rest of my life.  It's possible.

But that's how my family goes as far as framing the issues is concerned.  Right now my brother back home is the major framer.  And he is nuts as far as I'm concerned.  I want to stay as far away from him as possible.  He's the one that verbally and emotionally abused my mom resulting in her leaving a note with words referring back to his words said in anger the day before when she committed suicide.  She did have emotional problems, but that doesn't make it right, that kind of anger.  And I was trapped with no power really to do anything, although I did ask some people to look out for signs of this kind of abuse, but no one believed me.  So that's the brother that's framing issues for the family, I think, now.  I mean he's setting the stage for what the extended family should think of all of us - me down here, our other brother and his kids, also out of state.  So I am not sure they are getting the best image of me.  My parents might have been giving a better image of me than my brother is giving of me, so now if I went home it would be totally different because my brother had changed my image back there.  Because he's the one framing things now that our parents are both dead now and he's the only one left back at the home turf.

***

Emler (1983) claims that the themes of rationalism, individualism, and liberalism are overemphasized in Kohlberg's scheme.  His moral dilemmas concentrate on issues of property, liberty, life, and individual rights, all of which are traditional liberal values. (p. 168)

So this is looking at value development or how far along one is in value growth, and there are different ways of looking at it.  The Vienna mission wouldn't have wanted you to overrationalize it, I don't think.  I mean, they didn't really want you to understand what was going on, like what I've been doing here as the the socialization goals and why they might have been doing it, what their purposes were, how come they chose this method here and not the other one, etc.  They didn't like me just sitting and watching, although I don't think they knew that's what I was doing, but if they knew, they wouldn't have liked it and they would have just started to play with my mind all the more, I think.

Individualism?  Heavens no!  That doesn't even need any discussion.

Liberalism? These are Conservative Evangelical Christians, the kind that come close to idolizing James Dobson.  Liberalism is out of the question.

Property.  I don't see that as much of an issue... unless it refers to wanting to have an apartment to yourself.  Then it becomes an issue.  So the mission does concern itself with property under certain circumstances.

Liberty.  This is somewhat related to individualism, but not exactly the same.  I eventually learned that when you join the mission, once you arrive in Vienna you have absolutely no liberty.  Any liberty you think you have is an illusion, because it is just something they give you on a short reign.

Life.  Well, they can't deny you life.  But they can in a way, on the other hand, deny you your personhood, your identity.  They don't really care about that, it's not important.  Once you join the mission they can do with you as they wish; you are theirs, as so much chattel.  I can't speak for other people, but that's how I felt.  Again, though, this was under my veneer.

Individual rights.  Those were as illusive as the infamouse staff manual that nobody honored.

So much for traditional liberal values.

***

Indeed, the fact that we are motivated to be active at all is probably the best evidence for such correlations.  If we did not have reasonably  invariant action-outcome relations, goal-orient behavior would be unknown.  Studies of '"learned helplessness" have demonstrated how humans (and other animals) become inactive when their actions do not lead to somewhat predictable consequences (Seligman, 1975). 

This is pretty significant too.  I eventually felt some of this in Vienna when I couldn't figure things out, when I couldn't figure out how things worked in the mission, what some of the norms were.  So then I began to play it safe so I could watch others and at least not make any noticeable gaffs that would break my cover after I started having the alter ego - when I returned from the stint in the USA. 

But, take for example the switches in jobs.  I was the only one to be moved around like that, and that's a fact that no one can argue with.  I couldn't figure out what the "action-outcome" was that had resulted in some of these.  What had I done?  So if I can't figure out anything, then there's nothing I can improve on, right?  So this would also definitely have been part of my self esteem issues the year after I left the mission. 

I wasn't socialized completely, and so I didn't know all the things they thought I did.  Keeping a bit of distance was also a self defence.  It was a fine line to know how far to go either way and psychologically it was very difficult sometimes, so it wasn't something I took lightly to just choose when and how to keep my distance (rather than make myself available specifically to learn more of the mission's norms).

***

There is a certain similarity between the fulfillment of expectations formulation and other analyses in which objective and equal treatment for all plays a central role, most notably the world of Rawls and Kohlberg.  At the heart of the latter's concept of justice is the notion of extablishing consistent action-outcome expectations, so consistent in fact that they should be applied impartially and universally.

There is alwo a certain similarity between Gilligan's "ethic of care" and the humanitarian standard of justice outlined here; both are concerned with individual well-being per se, and in particular with avoiding hurt and suffering. (p. 187)

None of this sounds like my experience in the Vienna mission.  Consisten action-outcome expectations applied impartially and universally is a joke because I was singled out and treated singly probably the worst in their history ever, and for what?  You'd think I did some egregious sin or something.  So scratch that one.

On to Gilligan and the Humanitarian standard.  Concern with individual well-being, in particular with avoiding hurt and suffering?!  The mission was the very cause of my suffering as much as they will forever deny it.  They were not concerned for me; their tears were crocodile tears.   If they wanted to see strength, if they wanted to see someone survive in the lions den, I survived being myself 18 months and they didn't know it.  When they sent me to the States they sent me off with the verse

Jeremiah 12:5

New King James Version (NKJV)

The Lord Answers Jeremiah

⁵ “If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you,
Then how can you contend with horses?
And if in the land of peace,
In which you trusted, they wearied you,
Then how will you do in the floodplain^[a] of the Jordan?

And I tell them that I survived worse: I survived living among them and I refused to take on their hideous values - including their misuse of Scripture like this.  Because that's what it is. 

Don't tell me that working in the Vienna office is akin to running with footmen, because it isn't. and don't tell me that working in the East Bloc is akin to contending with horses.  I had worked in East Bloc countries before and I was fully capable of doing it again and I could.  So this is a huge misuse of Scripture to say your little psychological mantra or something.  But it was bogus and I knew it was bogus then too.

Did the mission really use Scripture like this on the theologians too?  Or maybe they got the theologians to use Scripture like this too, like a secret language or something.  But it's totally a misuse of Scripture.  They're really playing with fire there and I think they should rethink their approach and some of the supporters should start asking about this kind of thing to find out if it's going on, like in missions to closed countries.  This is not what the Bible is for and it's totally screwing up the minds of the missionaries too, I think.  I think it's at least a part of it.

So anyway, the H.R. director/Military chaplain who sent me back to the states with this verse as a send off was all concerned about me being strong enough for ministry in Eastern Europe - well remember that I lived from 1991 to 1997 in Siberia 5 time zones from Moscow so that's a complete joke.  But my concern was I scared spitless how I was going to survive staying in the mission.  Forget Eastern Europe; that's a piece of cake.  I got a mission to worry about, like big time.  So to survive I had to do my big mental trick that I've talked about so much wherein I sucked it up, eventually, and managed to keep all my same old ideas, thoughts and values inside, but I put on this veneer that I knew they wanted.  They wanted smiley, smiley concessions.  So that's what I gave them.  And I only held on to as much of the external activities on my own as I had strength to without risking caving in. 

So you see, they could not have wanted to avoid hurt and suffering, because all they wanted was for me to be tested as to see whether I could content with horses.

***

In psychology, a critical tenet of much of the work on justice is that the perception of injustice leads to internal discomfort, which then motivates efforts to redress the injustice. (p. 191)

Early on, I asked for a couple of things that were my rights that I learned about in the staff manual that I'd been given and in both times I'd been denied, for different reasons (I've discussed these in some details in other places).  After these incidences and then building on other experiences, I learned that there really wasn't a grievance system in place - that is, not an effective one.  Everyone was just going to support each other and there wasn't anyone that was going to even try to be a neutral party.  Basically the mission was a machine that no one dared counter.  So much for redress.

***

If a given justice criterion is perceived as legitimate, it will be accepted and supported.  The establishment of legitimacy is, at least in large part, a social affair; People must be convinced that specific justice criteria are proper. (p. 192)

This is a good point.  The summer was a whirlwind for me in a lot of ways, getting settled in, having a teacher with junior high students come through, starting in at the Austrian church, etc.  But the problem area was at work.  So the crisis would have had to have been dealt with the say in August.  But the thing was that I didn't want to approach the mission because I didn't trust them, right?  I was watching them and just doing my work even though I was having all these unexplained problems with the computer and all (that I was sure was rigged).  So my stress levels were through the roof.  But I wasn't talking.  But that's exactly what I should have done.  But if I came to them, then I would have been hooked, I might not have ended out going to the U.S. though.  But there's no way in heaven's name I could have agreed to or liked some of the stuff they were doing, so if I started talking I'm not sure where that would have led, to be honest.    Maybe I would have been in even worse trouble than doing it as I did with my not talking and them not knowing what I was thinking.

Well, if I did, in the course of things, reveal my true thoughts about things, they would have for sure tried to convince me otherwise, I'm sure.  I can't imagine it any other way.

But anyway, when I had my office at one of the rooms upstairs being the secretary I was supposed to be the director borrowed my "War and Peace" by Lev Tolstoy.  I think he read the whole thing because he had it long enough and it looks well-read.  Was that another one of those sort of symbolic meaning actions pointing to my dad (the war part) that my life seems to be riddled with?

So basically, what I needed, really, was an alibi, someone who was withi me 24/7 just to witness everything so that they could see the mess I was dealing with.  How could I know that this was going to go this way? 

***

The "conflicts of interests" view holds that it is social structures that create equal opportunities and outcomes, whereas the "missed opportunities" view focuses on the disadvantaged individual.  The former emphasizes social justice (i.e., intergroup contexts) and often advocates group struggle to change the system as the solution to injustice.  The latter emphasizes intra-and interpersonal justice and tends to view social benevolence and remedial aid for disadvandaged indivduals as the solutions. (p. 192-193)

The Vienna mission and I did not really have a conflict of interest because we were both interested in missions in Eastern Europe.  That being said, since I did not really see myself as a secretary and I wanted more people ministry I focused more on Austrian ministry than the mission seemed to want, although the authorities, per se, never actually said so, but I'm pretty sure that's the case all the same.  I think that not everything had to necessarily come through the authorities.  So in that issue there may have been a conflict of interest, although I had cleared it before I came to Vienna, so it shouldn't have been an issue. 

Missed opportunities might fit, I'm not sure.  Again, that would be if I should have gone in and talked with my boss.  The model was for socialization - and I mean for the secretaries especially here - that the boss had a special place as a kind of counsalor or confidante or something.  Maybe even a sort of father away from home  (although there was only something like 10 years difference between my boss and me).   We did talk some but I never broke down, like I think I was supposed to with all the problems I was having at work and the pettiness of some of the work.   Instead I bottled it all up inside and the stress just grew and grew and I took up running and biking and started taking these Austrian herbs, it was crazy the stress was so bad.  I'd literally never had anything like it and I still did not break down to talk. 

Then the U.S. military reserve chaplain/H.R. director decides I have culture shock (I was doing just fine at the Austrian church and getting around, etc., etc.) and wants to sent me home to the US for counseling - and this is where the horses verse comes in.

So the thing is, did I have a missed opportunity, in not coming in to talk to my boss sooner?  Is that what my injustice experience is all about?  Somehow I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the possibly of the answer being yes, so I'm going to say no.

After that the injustice was already done, so it was too late then.

***

There, we finished Furby.  And my day is mostly gone!