There's one more character flaw I want to discuss, but I'm going to save it for another post and go straight to the Buchanan article. We've reached the "Results" section of the article.
The author begins by discussing the results for the respondents who fit the first category (1st year on the job as manager). Of the 7 experiences expected to affect commitment at this stage, 3 of them accounted for 78% of the "commitment scale variance in the stage one regression. These were 1) group attitudes toward organization (.56, p<.01) 2) first-year job challenge .31, p<.01), and 3) loyalty conflicts (.11). "The strength of the loyalty conflicts experience suggests that there are limits to the malleability of new managers. Guidance is sought and accepted, but recruits apparently are skeptical of an sensitive to the organization's efforts to influence their attitudes and values. Influence attempts exceeding an individual's threshold of tolerance may well be counterproductive." (p. 542-543)
In this analysis, I seem to have had more in common with these new managers than I did with my fellow missionaries in Vienna, because no one else seemed to have as much problem with the mission's efforts to "influence their attitudes and values." Maybe this is a case in which they were naive and I wasn't? I mean, maybe they considered that since it was a mission trying to change them (assuming it tried to change all new workers) that it can't be a bad thing, because everyone knows that missions are instruments of God, right? Of course, it's very likely they weren't idealists, either, and so didn't have the same problem I did from that standpoint. But at any rate, my threshold wasn't very high, evidently, or maybe it just wasn't high in the areas the mission seemed to want to change me. It was definitely counterproductive if they really did want to integrate me. Of course, if they didn't really want to integrate me their tactics seemed to work reasonably well. If they didn't really want to integrate me that might also help account for the fact that I alone seemed to have so much trouble with what was going on.
***
I had marked up some other portions of text, but I don't think it offers anything new, so I'll just go on to the next text, which is...
Weiss, Howard M. (1978). Social learning of work values in organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 63(6) 711-718.
This article is a research paper about how workers learn values in organizations.
***
"In [Weiss's 1977] study, success and competence were influential model characteristics, with imitation occurring only among low-self-esteem workers." (p. 712)
Earlier the author had explained that there were theorized to be 3 main variables in at-work value learning: characteristics of the model, characteristics of the observer, and situation. This sentence just deals with the first two variables.
The important thing I want to mention here is the fact that I did not feel compelled to imitate anyone (e.g., another secretary) might have been at least in part because I didn't have low self-esteem, as that seems to be a characteristic that most usually is present in cases of imitation (at least according to this text).
This could be rather important, but not completely dissimilar to other things I've said before. That is, I felt comfortable in the Austrian context because I'd been there before (one summer ministry term was spent on the outskirts of Vienna) and I also had at least a rudimentary knowledge of German and a fairly good grasp of other things pertinent to where we were living and ministering. Also, I was an independent thinker who had come to a lot of my own conclusions (remember I was one of the few women discussing theology with the male students). It's likely that most others coming to serve in the Vienna mission had at least in these areas less confidence in their own knowledge and skills, so were more susceptible to learning by imitation than I was.
***
"Much of the socialization process can be characterized as an active 'role search' by new workers." (p. 712)
I don't remember doing much role searching per se in Vienna. There wasn't much to search by way of the work I was doing, although I did take instruction about relationships, such as trying to foster friendships with my boss's family. I spent more effort just trying to figure the mission out, though.
***
"The expressed values of models serve as an important source of information to the new employee. However, expressed values alone do not provide enough information. Additional information is provided by the characteristics of the model. Bandura (1971, 1977) has argued that model characteristics such as success, competence, and nurturance provide information about the appropriateness of imitation and the likelihood of the observer receiving valued outcomes for behaving similarly or expressing similar values. Further, not all new employees actively seek the information provided by models. For example, Bandura (1971, 1977) and others (Flanders, 1968, Weiss, 1977) have suggested that individuals with low self-esteem are generally less confident in their own reactions to ambiguous situations and are therefore more likely to imitate others... Additionally, it is suggested that individuals with experience in a similar setting are less likely to engage in fewer role search activities because of previous learning histories." (p. 712)
Again, my model was my boss's boss's secretary. She did give me tips, but we were quite different personalities and are backgrounds were also very different, but I could see how she was involved in mission activities, especially social activities, and take a cue that those kinds of things would probably be appropriate for me too, even if my personality might lead to a somewhat different application. But this wasn't very controversial and I didn't have a problem with it and I don't think the mission faulted me particularly for anything along these lines either.
Since I was most concerned with the values and logic of what I was experiencing and seeing in the mission, I don't think I engaged in much by way of "role searching activities." I was arguably more active in searching for ways to get involved in the Austrian setting than I was in "role searching activities."
While I did have experience in somewhat similar settings, the similarity, which I soon found out, was very limited, at least when talking just about the mission itself.
***
"It was also suggested that individuals who have experienced similar situations or who are confident that their own reactions to various situations are generally correct will be less inclined to engage in role search. This latter argument is the explanation given for the self-esteem effect reported in this study." (p. 717)
I just want to say here that I thought my "reactions to various situations [were] generally correct" in as much as I thought the mission was wrong in what I could see of their ways of operating. In other words, "various situation" for me meant how I thought things should be done, rather than how things were done in the mission. Maybe others coming to the mission didn't have such an entrenched concept of how things should be done. In any case, I didn't think that my reactions were necessarily correct in the sense of what the mission leadership wanted. I knew there was a gap between my view and theirs, but I wasn't sure of a lot of the details of the differences.
***
"It may, in fact, be more useful and accurate to suggest that high-self-esteem individuals also engage in a role search procedure. However, as in any information search, an individual searching for his work role can look internally (at information stored in memory) or externally in the environment. High-self-esteem individuals may find the information retrieved from memory more relevant to the role definition problem than do low-self-esteem individuals. As a result, they would be less likely to seek and use information provided externally by models." (p. 717).
This may describe what I mean about having an idea of how things should have been in Vienna - it was a mental image based on experience, study and, often, careful thought. So that was my point of reference which guided me in my interactions, to a large extent, in the Vienna mission context. They wouldn't have liked that and would have wanted to be the sole source of values. If my conceptual images and ideals had been closer to the mission's there wouldn't have been such a problem, I'm sure, and that's how it would work for people who came from years of working with other Eastern European missions. Since my experience was more heterogeneous, I had never been fully socialized into a mission before, but I had been able to come to my own conclusions. I think learning this way can be advantageous in that it can avoid groupthink and it's also perhaps easier to think outside the box.
***
This brings us to the end of this article, too! So we've just finished 2 articles in one blog! The pile is whittling away, really, and the farther along we go the more I can skip over sections that seem unnecessary and overly redundant.
