"For individual employees, understanding their agency's, bureau's, or office's culture provides some consistency, stability, and predictability, particularly for new people who have a high need for accurate information about what matters. Unwritten and often unspoken understandings (organizational culture) develop among employees to help them cope with these complex ambiguities and make sense out of all sorts of things. The matters of concern include:
- what could and should not be done in different circumstances, what should be done first, and maybe what is never done;
- how different activities and groups are to be approached;
- what assumptions are to be made when performing an analysis;
- true performance expectations (what it takes to become influential here); and
- what is to be said publicly or privately that may not reflect operating reality.
First of all, this text has value by virtue of the long of the description it provides of what constitutes organizational culture. It's quite possible - even probably - that mission leadership might deny any particular attribute I might assign to it, but at the very least they must accept that an organizational culture does exist, including things listed here as components of organizational leadership, and the organizational culture should be able to account for things that happen in the organization and its relationships with others outside the organization and with the environment it operates in. So they might try to deny my interpretation but then it would be helpful for them to provide an alternate one that satisfactorily explains what I experienced and witnessed. Since they are intelligent people, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they produced one (interpretation of their culture at the time I was there) that was at odds with mine but relatively credible.
There is one thing that I take issue with in this text, and that is the apparent assumption that organizational culture happens by accident and/or haphazardly, perhaps more as a series of reactions than proactive and intentional actions. Maybe the text does describe with some accuracy how cultures in U.S. government agencies develop and evolve, but I think there is a glaring omission in regards to applying it to the Vienna mission, and that is, as I just suggested, the issue of intentionality.
I can't say how much of the Vienna mission culture was intentional, but I think a good chunk of it was. It's possible that some of it evolved in a more fortuitous or accidental manner, but a lot of it was also intentional. I think details of the more ceremonial, camaraderie-building and shared identity aspects of the culture might have involved haphazardness elements in their development, for example. But it seemed to me that a lot of the culture was more top down, and even quirks of individual departments (which I think were kept to a minimum for the sake of unity) were top-down from the department head, for example. At any rate, a lot of the culture of the organization probably had to at least have the sanction of the leadership and anything appearing contrary to their desires or how they thought the mission should operate, would have been squelched as soon as it was recognized as a potential problem.
This top-down aspect of the culture gave it a feel, to me at least, of social engineering, which made it all the harder to accept. Of course, there could also be issues with haphazard culture development, but the top-down aspect increased, I think, the importance of the rationale for the culture. That is, it seemed that if there was a top-down element to the culture, there probably was a reason for it or else the leadership wouldn't be pushing it on the organization. With this understanding, then, it's uncertain which was most important, knowing the specific cultural aspect or knowing why it was a component of the organizational culture. This is a part of the ambiguity I had/have about the Vienna mission's organizational culture.
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Next we move on to a new sub-section of the article: "Negative Implications."
"Understanding organizational culture also is important because of its potentially negative implications. On one hand, a new employee who fails to understand important aspects of the culture or who consciously decides not to adapt it, risks future effectiveness and could jeopardize a career. On the other hand, over-adaptation to an organizational culture leads to over-conformance and loss of self-identity. Collective over-adaptation reduced organizational creativity. It causes rigidity and group think. A strong organizational culture provides employees with a clear sense of shared purpose and identity, but it can also block change." (p. 54.)
I clearly fit under the consciously deciding not to adapt it rubric, but I think I also didn't understand important aspects of it either. There could well be multiple explanations as to why I didn't understand these things, but I think a major reason is that it was intentionally hard to understand the organization until you were an insider and you didn't become an insider until you had taken that great leap of faith to trust you fate to the organization. What I mean by the organization being intentionally hard to understand is that that was part of its security defense system; at least that's how I see it and I'm pretty sure I'm right. So my deciding not to adapt virtually precluded the possibility of my really understanding the culture; I had to adapt before I could understand, in very simplistic terms.
I think I dealt with the over-adaptation issue in another discussion, but I can't remember the context, so it might bear going over again. Basically, it's hard for me to understand how one could have over-adapted in the Vienna mission context. In general, I think that "over adaptation" would probably be an indication that you didn't really get it and there would be some kind of a corrective response from the mission in accordance to the issue involved, how much the individual did this over-adapting, etc.
As far as "loss of identity" is concerned, I can't say I saw this happening in the mission. So somehow, in the internalizing of the group's norms the individual still maintained their basic personality and the like, although I could see a change in people too, in the sense of there developing sort of a family resemblance, if you will, between members. I'm thinking of newcomers I knew while there. At the very least, I think it's common for people who spend a lot of time together to begin to become like each other in various way, so that's the kind of thing I mean.
I think "loss of identity" might have been something I feared, though, and I couldn't garner the trust to open myself to it. I think I would have had to like what I saw in the mission in order to allow it to change me that way. But since I didn't like what I saw I didn't want to become like it.
Regarding "collective over-adaptation" decreasing organizational creativity and causing rigidity and group think, I think there was some of this at the mission. I don't think there was a lot of creativity going on, or only in narrowly defined parameters. They were more concerned with someone being a potential (security) problem via too much "creativity" and independent thinking, which is part of why I was a problem - "under-adaptation" and too much independent thinking. So they were willing, basically, to forgo or limit creativity for the sake of group control and security.
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I'm skipping a couple sections in the article and jumping to "Interpretation."
"How does someone who is new to an agency identify aspects of an organizational culture and distinguish between the core and noncore aspects of it? (Core aspects are the norms, beliefs, rituals, behaviors, or whatever, that are widely accepted as basic to the survival of the identity or character of the agency.) Conformance expectations are much stronger for core aspects." (p. 54)
I think I had no or very little trouble with the "noncore" aspects of the culture of the mission. They could probably tell I hadn't adapted the core aspects of the culture because, first of all, I think I became somewhat aloof when I realized I wasn't sure I liked what I saw going on in the mission. In this way I wasn't open, so the mission didn't know what I was thinking, and I didn't give very many clues. At the same time, I was developing a life for myself outside the mission, which indicated lack of apprehension of the organizational culture, maybe even a flaunting of it. I was trying to understand the mission, but they might not have been able to tell that because I was trying to understand it from a perspective of not liking what I saw and I didn't want them to particularly know that. I think I sense that I needed to do that for self protection, and you'll understand when I get to the chronology of my experiences why I might have felt I needed to protect myself, because the mission had strategies available to it to assure members conformed, although I didn't realize the extent to which this was so until I experienced it, at which time I began to wonder what else they could do beyond what they did to me.
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I want to finish the "Interpretation" section, and there are two sub-section in it. The first one is "Language Patterns."
"For example, several years ago I did some consulting for a small human service delivery agency. None of the employees could talk about the agency or its work for more than a few minutes before some military management jargon and concepts would slip into their vocabulary. It didn't require much sensitivity to register the incongruity: human services professionals (social workers, psychologists, rehabilitation counselors, etc.) in a small agency that serves people with mental retardation, regularly talking in military management language.
Spotting the incongruity and beginning to build a pattern was made even easier when I realized that these same people did not use the jargon when they were talking about nonwork topics. Yes, when I asked the origins of the practice, no one knew they did it! These are clues to organizational culture that one can glean by listening to the incongruities of the use of language." (p. 55)
I'm not going to discuss "language pattern" issues per se, because I'm not sure it's applicable to the Vienna mission context, at least I don't remember anything along these lines being particularly incongruent, although at one point the director of h.r. at the mission (one of the 2 reserve military chaplains on staff) made a comment that they weren't "professional." I don't remember what the context of the discussion was, but I remember distinctly thinking "professional what?" and half suspecting he meant spies or intelligence workers.
But I mainly want to point out here from this text that in that example there was a group of highly educated workers - all of the professionals would have had at least master's degrees - who couldn't really see beyond the end of their nose and missed such an obvious (to an outsider) incongruity (in relation to what their work was about). So I want to point out that this is possible and has happened before and could have been the case in the Vienna mission too. Of course, why they might not recognized it is another issue all together, but defense mechanism comes to mind as one possibility.
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The next sub-section is "Incongruities"
"The most effective processes for identifying aspects of organizational culture for practical uses are more akin to sleuthing then to conducting research. Sensitivity to incongruities is the most valuable skill. Sleuthing for clues to organizational culture involves registering (or mentally recording) things that 'just don't fit.' Incongruities often are clues about the organizational culture. They signal the presence of underlying patterns of assumptions, beliefs, or values. However, a single clue never provides sufficient information to solve a mystery. Several clues must be registered before a pattern can be pieced together." (p. 55)
I don't think the Vienna mission was terribly conscious of this kind of thing, but it assumed that new comers (unless they came from extensive service with one of the 15 member agencies) would not have much of a framework against which to determine whether there were congruities. It banked on this being so and using this weakness to walk this person (relatively) easily into acceptance of the group's norms. Any incongruities the person might sense would be easily explained away and in this way the person would let their guard down and trust the organization.
In any case, identification of any "sleuthing" going on would have been cause for issuing a red alert signal and all defenses going up to protect the group from said "sleuthing." Needless to say, I suppose I could have been guilty of sleuthing in as much as I was observing and trying to figure things out. One thing they valued at the mission was being able to keep things to yourself - keep secrets - I learned how to do this about 5 months into my stay with them, which is why no one, even family members knew at the time what I was going through or thinking. But from the mission's perspective this would have been a misuse of a skill they highly valued, because I wasn't supposed to keep secretes from them (at least not all of them - someone among them should have been a trustworthy confidant, preferably my boss or my boss's secretary or someone like that). But my writings here are evidence of my sleuthing. And in as much as they didn't comprehend what my thoughts were, these writings are also evidence of my being able to keep a secret... at least for a while.
I expect that the only way incongruities might have been noticed in the Vienna mission was if someone came with sufficient background to have something to compare the mission to and also have sufficient values orientation towards the discrepancies. Without the values orientation aspect the mission would probably have still been able to convincingly explain concerns away.
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There's enough left of this article for one more post, but I'm going to leave off here.
