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.
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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?
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.
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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.
