This next article is:
Hebden, J. E. (1986, Summer). Adopting an organization's culture: the socialization of graduate trainees. Organizational Dynamics, 15(1), 54-72.
This paper is a study concerning management trainees perceptions of organizations they are working in and how well their expectations and experiences coincide. I'm skipping most of the article and skipping to the data analysis section. This first segment is in the section discussing the issue of power.
"The realization that they were subject to such arbitrary decisions was slow to dawn on many trainees, but as this perception grew, so did the gap between the graduates' preferred ideal state and their perception of reality. This observation was particularly marked by a decline in the trainees' levels of trust, both in the company as a whole and in the individual managers who found the company culture conducive to autocratic interpersonal styles." (p. 66)
I'd just like to point out the obvious: that apparent arbitrariness might reduce levels of trust in those experiencing it. The point is that if trust is desired, arbitrariness (apparent or real) may defeat the purpose. That is, management that wants trust but acts like this might be shooting themselves in the foot... Assuming the Vienna mission wanted me to trust them, they sure seemed to take a strange approach to getting it out of me. I hope h.r. is reading this.
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Under the heading "Task":
"At the beginning of their employment, the trainees were all enthusiastic and eager to learn. At the same time, with perhaps some naivety, they perceived their employers as being equally task oriented; many quotations illustrating this perception could be taken from the recordings of the first interviews...
This view of the training as being essentially task-oriented quickly faded in the face of reality. The trainees found themselves doing low-level, routine, clerical, and manual work they could not link to management training." (p. 68)
When I came to Vienna I knew my secretarial skills weren't exactly stellar, although I certainly knew the basics, so I did expect some learning to take place as well as just the regular learning the ropes of any new job, but otherwise, I pretty much expected to jump right into my work as a secretary. For one thing, the trainees in this study were long-term trainees that were in special trainee programs that introduced them to a lot of different managerial tasks and different department, whereas I was with a mission. I expected that the mission would be in need of workers and that's why they brought me over there and I expected them to also be conscientious of how they used supporters' money, which would seem to disallow my spending an excessive and needless amount of time pouring over software manuals, for example. In this way, they didn't really seem to care how they spent supporters' money, or that was way down on the totem pole of their value system. I did not foresee that kind of thing at all.
One question then is: Did they or didn't they need a secretary in the position they brought me over for? By the time I left it appeared to me that they didn't. How ethical is that? Explain that to me and my supporters! I really would like to hear an answer to these questions.
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That's it for that article, but I have 13 minutes left on the stimulator, so I'm going to start in on the next one. I only have 4 texts left in this file, but their on the thicker side. This one doesn't have so much to comment on though.
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and Adaptation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Chap. 9, "Social Influence", p. 349-383.
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This first section of the text comes under the section "Culture and Emotion" and the sub-section "How Cultural Influence Works." The author is mainly dealing with culture on a national level, but I think this section could be applied elsewhere as well:
"The desire to conform to and believe in a cultural outlook, which is a prime source of social and political stability, has at least three motivational bases: direct personal reward, internalization of the set of values maintained in the culture, and the power of the group to punish the individual for transgressions. Sociopaths and criminals are notoriously deviant from the rest of the society because they fail to internalize social values." (p. 357)
The ideal in the Vienna mission, and what was expected once you'd sort of passed the threshold of socialization (the leap of faith, total submission, whatever you want to call it) was very clearly internalization of their values. But before you reached that point, the direct personal reward or "power of the group to punish the individual for transgressions" had to fill in for lack of internalization. This, of course, is good ol' behavioristic reinforcement psychology.
So what this text seems to be saying (ignoring the internalization option) is that there were two basic ways you could be socialized into the Vienna mission, for example. In my particular case, we'll assume that the mission wanted to socialize me, and what it wanted - nothing less - was for me to internalize their values. The only ways they could do this, according to this text, is being coaxing me with cookies (which I love but probably not enough to change my values) or by putting me in a room full of big, hairy spiders (which I hate maybe enough to change my values). These of course are sort of non-logical ways of influence, which, I think the mission would use (not those exact examples, though).
But it might also have tried to logically try to induce me to internalize their values. For example, they might have waxed eloquent about how the mission was dedicated to my best interests and wanted to help me reach my full potential in having an impact in this very needy part of the world... Or they just been frank with me and said that if I didn't internalize their values I might as well give up and go home.
There are, of course, lots of potential variants and twists and turns this kind of thing might have entailed, but I hope you see that they only had 2 basic options, the proverbial carrot or stick.
One problem with that, though, is that I couldn't figure out very well what was carrot and what was stick, unless it was something glaringly obvious that a 2 year old would have caught, because I never really understood the mission very well, especially in its intricacies. And I don't think the mission was going to ever be direct about it, at least not until I displayed evidence of beginning to internalized their values. But the not vocalizing was also part of their culture, in that it exemplified how it related to outsiders, I think.
In this way, though, I really was expected to be willing to change my values without even really knowing fully what theirs were or why they held them. And I don't think I was the only one that this was expected of, so others must have been able to overcome any objections they might have had to it.
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My stimulator has ended now, so I'm going to say good-bye. I think we should be able to finish this text next time though, unless I get too off on a tangent or something.
