But back to the text...
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"Since Krebs's review, the evidence has continued to mount in support of the parsimonious explanation of mood (i.e., affect or emotional state) as a major determinant of altruism and other forms of prosocial behavior." (p. 30-31)
Having done some research on civil society and social movements, this statement (and the surrounding text) does seem to mesh with with other things I've read in those areas. But it doesn't fit my upbringing that well, in that my family didn't think that way. I think my parents might not necessarily have had the worst affective situation, but their upbringings weren't that great, yet they both were very altruistic and gave of time and money rather freely to help others. So this idea of having affect determine your altruism was pretty foreign to me, I think and in Vienna I wouldn't have thought this way. Later on, in Russia I eventually started to become burned out and sort of tired of swimming upstream.
I'm skipping over a discussion about mood because I don't think it applies much to my time in Vienna. I think at that time I was generally a pretty upbeat person, although I'd been through a stressful time the few years before in my living situation and financially while in Bible school. But I was certainly much, much more upbeat and positive in my outlook than I am now after all I've been through at this point in my life.
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The rest of the article discusses instruments developed and tested to measure organizational citizenship behavior. The discussion is not pertinent enough to the issues I need to discuss, although motivation and job satisfaction are things we'll come back to eventually, and you can imagine that that will be interesting.
Although it's late and I could end here, this would really be a short post, so I'll begin commenting on another article:
Katz, Daniel (1964). The motivational basis of organizational behavior. Behavioral Science, 9, 130.
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"At the practical level.... we need to cope with such organizational realities as the attracting of people into the organization, holding them within the system, insuring reliable, role performance, and in addition stimulate actions which are generally facilitative of organizational accomplishment...
The complexities of motivational problems in organizations can be understood if we develop an analytic framework which will be comprehensive enough to identify the major sources of variance and detailed enough to contain sufficient specification for predictive purposes. The framework we propose calls for three steps in an analysis process, namely, the formulation of answers to these types of questions: (1) What are the types of behavior required for effective organizational functioning?... (2) what are the motivational patterns which are used and which can be used in organizational settings?... (3) What are the conditions in an organizational setting?..." (p. 131)
As you can see by the "..." in this quote I'm leaving sections out, mainly for brevity. One of these ommitted sections notes that generally organizational members are required to play several behaviors in the organization, which might entail entirely different motivations and settings. An example of this in the Vienna mission setting might be my duties as a secretary and the informal expectations that I would befriend my boss' wife and children. These would be exactly the kinds of things that might need to be addressed separately, so we'll see if this author has anything that might she some light on that aspect of my experience in Vienna.
And since it is after 1 a.m. I am going to call it a night, so you'll just have to wait until my next post to see if we can find anything helpful out from this text. And hopefully I'll be able to return to my usual browser too.
