342. Organizational Behavior, Pt. 66 (Farh, Podsakoff & Organ, pt. 2)

I did some scoping around today regarding some thoughts I'd been having lately that I might be having some pronunciation difficulties.  I pulled out my favorite go-to handbook and found several pairings that seemed somewhat difficult.  Then, since migraine seemed the mostly logical culprit I looked online for anything migraine related and I was shocked at what I found.  I guess there is something called "complex migraine" that causes pronunciation problems, but from what I found that would be much worse that mine.  So maybe if I have anything like that it's a very mild case.

It seems so strange that my migraine is so constant, but the complex migraines aren't constant either.  Still, maybe it's another piece in the puzzle.  I'm scheduled to start speech therapy in a month - the soonest I could get in.  It's not like you couldn't understand me.  It's maybe like I have a slurred speech or something.

***

The next section of text I'll be citing from is: "Task Characteristics."

"The essence of intrinsic motivation, according to deCharms (1968), is the person's self-conception as 'Origin' rather than 'Pawn.' To think of oneself as Origin is to think beyond external requirements and instrumental incentives." (p. 709)

This is really part of a larger discussion that is more in keeping with discussion about the task, as the section title might indicate, but I'm not so interested in discussing the surrounding discussion at this point.

How I understand this text is that the worker, the individual, is him/herself the origin of his/her own motivation and as such he/she is a cog in a wheel.   At the Vienna mission, however, intrinsic motivation, I think, had to be group approved.  I most definitely had intrinsic motivation, but I had all kinds of trouble with it.  I don't know if other people managed to find ways to harness their intrinsic motivation in ways that were mission-approved, but I never figured that out.

So, as far as I ever knew, intrinsic motivation in the Vienna mission was not generally well accepted.  If any intrinsic motivation at all was accepted, it would have had to have been in very narrowly defined terms, because the mission could not tolerate independence or surprises and found these types of things to be inexcusable security risks.

***

I'm  jumping over all the description of the study and going straight to the discussion.

"Overall, the data do not support the view that satisfaction is in any sense a direct or antecendent of either Altruism or Compliance: that is, a model in which mediates the effects of leader fairness and/or task characteristics is not tenable.  As indicated in Figure 1, the evidence here is more consistent with the idea that leader fairness and task characteristics are the relevant causal variables with satisfaction and OCB correlated because they are common effects of the causal factors." (p. 716-717)

Overall, I'd say the  Vienna mission leadership did exactly the right things to make me unsatisfied with my time with the mission.  Ergo, you should not be surprised when I say that I was not satisfied.  Okay?

The Vienna leadership were completely unfair with their treatment of me and the tasks I was given to do were way beneath what I was capable of doing and mostly weren't even what I came to do.

***

I guess that's it for that article too, because there aren't any more quotes in it that look helpful.  So I'll pick a new one next time.