"(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 for eliciting a given motivational pattern in an organizational setting?" (p. 131)
Not all of these questions are equally relevant to my purposes, but consider this an advance organizer (from my teaching or reading skills days).
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Starting with the first question, which is the first major article section "BEHAVIOR REQUIREMENTS," and skipping a couple sub-sections to "Innovative and spontaneous behavior.""A neglected set of requirements consists of those actions not specified by role prescriptions which nevertheless facilitate the accomplishment of organizational goals. The great paradox of a social organization is that it must not only reduce human variability to insure reliable role performance but that it must also allow room for some variability and in fact encourage it...." (p. 132)
Clearly this was very important in the Vienna mission because once it dealt with things outside its walls, especially with things "in-country" - i.e., in Eastern Europe - it needed its workers to be able to think on the fly, problem solve, think creatively, etc. But there were also serious risks at stake that needed to be kept in mind while doing this, so there had to be, as I've mentioned more than once, trust between members, but also certain relevant knowledge and experience to be able to make good decisions. So innovation and spontaneity was always under careful scrutiny and only permitted where and to whom it was trusted.
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The next sub-section is titled "Co-operaton.""The patterned activity which makes up an organization is so intrinsially a co-operative set of interrelationships, that we are not aware of the co-operative nexus any more than we are of any habitual behavior like walking...." (p. 132)
This section cites examples and how one study showed that cooperation among department members increased productivity. In the Vienna mission this was clearly a very major value and crossed all spheres of life there, including outside the office (home life, etc.). I think this was a part of the security system to make the organization as self-sufficient as possible and as close as possible to a closed system (a sociological term - go to p. 36) as possible.
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The next sub-section is "Protection."
"Another subcategory of behavior facilitative of organizational functioning is the action which protects the organization aganst disaster. There is nothing in the role prescriptions of the worker which specifies that he be on the alert to save life and property in the organization." (p. 133)
I think Katz maybe should have qualified this all-inclusiveness a bit, because I have a feeling that the Vienna mission isn't the only organization and there are also certain positions in every day firms that are told explicitly to protect something or the other of the organization. In any case, virtually everyone in the Vienna mission was supposed to be on high alert virtually all the time (granted some times more alert than at other times). This was not an organization where people believed in passing the buck regarding protection of the organization and anything related to the ministry. So if anyone received a signal from a reliable source (such as their boss or the director) that something was amiss, even if they didn't understand or know what was wrong, they would immediately go in defensive mode for the sake of the ministry and be ready to take orders, explicit or otherwise as far as what they should do, if anything.
This might sound as if I'm overdoing it, but if you experienced what I did in my departure you'd see that these people all took a stand in unison against me and I doubt that they all, including my boss' teenage daughter, really knew that my egregious risk to the mission was. Well, if they didn't know then, and they know who I am as I write this they understand now why I was dangerous, I expect.
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The next sub-heading is "Constructive ideas."I think this is similar to "Innovative and spontaneous behavior," but maybe it's more along the lines of planning, rather than reacting to problems as they come up. This might be more like someone suggesting a new course to teach or learning of a new group in another city that they could contact as a potential new group of students, for example. This kind of thing would probably be limited to the well seasoned workers, and if others had any ideas like that they would have to run it by their superiors who would present it if it seemed feasible, but it would probably be greatly re-worked in the meantime because anyone below a certain level in the hierarchy would be at a disadvantage regarding knowledge level as to what was really going on in the mission to make reasonable suggestions. And if they did present a good suggestion there would be the issue of rank and power, and the person would still need to be kept in their place because s/he presumably was still in their position/rank for a reason.
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The next sub-heading is "Self-training."This is ironic, because this was exactly part of my socialization, in that I had been denied the opportunity to take a software class back home (they wouldn't tell me what software was used, saying it wasn't necessary, I could learn on the job), so I spent the first couple months reading software manuals and learning that way. So this was a management-imposted self-training, which I don't think is quite what Katz means here; rather, I think Katz means the individual taking the initiative on their own to learn new skills.
The thing was in Vienna it was hard to do much of anything for any length of time that wasn't known by someone or the other and approved or disapproved of. So if they found out you were doing some self-training they would have wanted to consider whether it was really necessary or not and that was their determination or not. And they determined this not just on the basis of your technical skills, but on a whole host of other things, including whether it was more important for you to help socialize the new secretary, whether your attitude was more important than your skills, whether your boss didn't like that you just up and decided to learn something without talking it over with him first and he wanted to teach you that that's not how things were done there, or maybe your mentor could help you with it (although your mentor was very busy at the moment).
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The last sub-section is "Favorable attitude."In Vienna they were mainly interested in security, that you faithfully parrot the line about them being an international printing company. I think as far as they were concerned, that was about all you needed to ever say about them to outsiders if you had to say anything about them at all. So then you didn't really have to worry about the negative or positive issue, just the security issue there. Same thing is more or less true in Eastern Europe, although when you were with the students or other believers they obviously knew you weren't an "international publishing company" (catch the deception there?) so you didn't have to pretend to be something you weren't, but they were also discreet enough to know what not to ask and the like. In private meetings outside of class sessiongs they might send greetings to others back in the mission and ask of someone's welfare (someone who had been sick, who just got married, had been in the States on furlough, etc.).
The negative/positive issue comes into play regarding communications with folk back home - or, in my case, anywhere I happened to have friends, including Australia, E. Germany, or wherever. That's when they wanted the party line parroted back home. They might as well have sent me to indoctrination classes or something, or maybe that's what it was inthe States when they sent me back, sort of my own little private GULAG.
Well, I just made a Freudian slip and revealed my attitude, which was not, as you can guess, up to par. I didn't start out that way though. They made me that way, really. I came ready to go and serve do a good job. I never was on a high really about it though, I guess. I think I came level-headed about it. I'm not sure, but that might have thrown them for a loop. But the thing was that I'd already had all that other experience and training and I was glad to be there but just not on a high about it - not in euphora or something.
I've already written so much here about how my experiences there led to my attitude change how the discrepencies. I was really rather bowled over by the welcome though. But it wasn't long before I began to notice the discrepancies, like the software manuals discussed above - 2 months of pretty much non-work, a waste of supporters' money. And these things ate away at my attitude and I refuse to take the blame for that because I didn't cause these events, the mission leadership did. The software manual incident was a stupid, manipulative social engineering-type socialization ploy that had no place in a Christian mission and I had no responsibility to accept that kind of playmanship and for them to expect that I should have a positive attitude about it is sorely mistaken on their part. They were wrong and they misused their power in that and in a myriad other ways while I was with them. God is not manipulative, Got does not force submission and He does not authorize His servants to use such means either. In contrast, this is the kind of methodology Satan would use, and also the Communists, for example, used.
This is the end of this section of the article.
