This section is "Organizational Loyalty" and it refers to the same figure discussed in the text I used last time.
"In Fig. 2b, organizational social rights are shown paired with organizational loyalty. The logic underlying this proposition is that for whom an organization guarantees greater socioeconomic benefits are most likely to return the favor, that is to engage in behavior that protects the organization, enhances its reputation, and serves the whole rather than the parochial interests specific parts."(p. 260)
So basically this is saying that organizational loyalty on the part of the employee is formally recognized by the employer organization and the employee's social rights correspond to his/her level of organizational loyalty. To refresh our memories, referring back to earlier portions of this text, "organizational social rights" include things like "claims to economic resources in the form of wage and salary income, bonuses, current fringe benefits, and pension contributions; social status symbols, such as office size and location, private dining facilities, etc." (p. 256)
Economic resources, for the most part wouldn't particularly be fitting in a faith mission setting, but certainly there were status symbols, as I mentioned earlier when I discussed this text. But the thing here is, did organizational loyalty seem to correspond to organizational social rights in the Vienna mission?
I would say that at the beginning this is definitely so. That is, you had to pass the socialization test to meet the minimum entry level of organizational loyalty to have any organizational social rights at all. Even once you were hired, you didn't have any organizational social rights until you passed that hudle. Or if you had any such rights, it was only on the assumption that you would pass that test, so you might have been given those rights as an advance payment on that assumption. That's what I think, based on my experience of the mission and what I observed.there.
The thing was though that the organization was limited how much benefit it could bestow on those who grew exceedingly in organizationaly loyalty. This was begause it wasn't a regular employer nor a corporation. I think there probably was a cap on loyalty, so that a boss could not be superceded, for example. I'm not sure how this would have been handled though. But I have a hard time imagining any of the department heads having a junior member that surpassed them in organizational loyalty (and I'm thinking of specific people).
The one area that may have allowed for this, however, is the information organization, but I doubt it, because this is too serious of an issue to relagate to the information organization. This is the kind of thing that could make individuals strong enough in the organization with no official power, so they could end out being an alternate voice, which is most adamately NOT something the mission would have tolerated.
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"Proposition 5: As organizational social rights increase, so does organizational loyalty." (p. 261)
It's too bad this proposition doesn't say anything about what happens when social rights decrease, as they seemed to do with my case, although at times they seemed to increase a bit. Here's my hypothesis, if you don't mind humoring me a bit: As organizational social rights decrease, so does organizational loyalty. There is a direct one to one negative relationship, or at least there should be. If there are any social scientists out there who would like to test this hypothesis out, I'd be more than curious to find out the results. I suspect, however, you'll have to work with a small sample, so it'll end out being a qualitative study. You can prove me wrong there, however.
In my case, I was very loyal to ministry in Eastern Europe, and I started out very excited about the work of the Vienna mission (although not about the secretarial position). Then they proceeded to show me the underbelly of the beast, if you will, and I continued to be loyal to ministry in Eastern Europe (which is why I ended out there again in the 1990s), but I was in shock, I guess, among other emotions and lost my loyalty, but felt loyalty to a faith mission system, wherein one goes around to all these churches and raises funds to go to the mission field for a certain length of time. So I felt strapped to the Vienna mission, I think by that, and just being in shock and refusing to thinking that things were as bad as they really were and that all these intelligent people really were caught up in this thing. So I wasn't loyal as the mission would have wanted me to be, but there was some kind of loyalty that kept me there. There was confusion, too. Since I was an outsider and they didn't have written rules really, I didn't always really understand what was going on, especially towards the end, when it got worse. I think they did it on purpose so I wouldn't be able to tell others about what it was like there. Like what I'm doing on this blog.
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"Proposition 7. Strong relational ties to the organization are associated with an increase in interpersonal helping behavior directed at others in the organization." (p. 261)I can't see any reason to question that this was was clearly and very predominantly a part of the Vienna mission psyche and mutual internal relations.
I do have a question, however regarding the phrase "are associated with an increase in interpersonal helping behavior...". Does this mean that the author is hypothesizing a correlation between the helping behavior and the strong relational ties? It doesn't seem that the wording indicates that she is hypothesizing a cause-effect relationship. It could be that she is using the "helping behavior" as the behavior to be measured, relagating "strong relational ties" to the "otherwise directly unmeasurable" pile. But it seems that there have been other such concepts in this article, so, I find this theory untenable.
It seems to me that the author (probably out of uncertainty regarding the relationship between the issues in question) used the phrase "associated with" to indicate correlation. In this case, There is some kind of relationship between the two items, but just not cause-effect (probably).
This is all nice and good, but what does it have to do with the Vienna mission? Everyone in the mission was expected to have strong relational ties to the organization. Of course, the higher you got up the mission the more ties you might have, but even at the lowest levels members had, I think, pretty much just as strong ties, just not as many ties and ties on their level of the mission (i.e., lower down). And everyone was involved in helping behavior, except that the more you moved up the socializational ladder (and it was a short ladder), the more kinds of helping behavior you could do, because you'd have access to more ways to help. So helping could even be viewed as a privilige to be earned or, conversely, you could be disallowed from helping if you were in the outs somehow. In that case taking the privilege away was a sort of punishment.
I'm speaking from my experience and how I viewed the mission during my stay there. Others might have viewed things differently.
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I'm going to end here, because I need to get on with my day. Next time we'll continue with "Organizational Participation."
