I'm picking up here in a section titled "Use of Contectual Rather than Modal Analysis."
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"In the culture literature there is frequent reference to culture's impact on at least the following seven critical performance-related processes.
Climate Formation. Ashforth (1985) pointed out that culture determines both what features of organizational settings are considered relevant by members and also the standards used to evaluate these features." (p. 552)
In the Vienna mission it seemed like just about everything was "relevant" or potentially "relevant." But the standard had to do with security, so it was like something could be a "person of interest" in police parlance. But just about everything that was non-mission was a potential security threat. Since they even had internal security control (such as the "need to know" manner of running things, where you only had access to information pertinent to your work), outsiders were all the more kept at bay. So that's the climate formation.
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"Behavioral Control. Culture regulates behavior implicitly and most effectively (Faux, 1982). It can control perceptual and emotional processes that are beyond the reach of standard control systems (Pfeffer, 1981), help to socialize new members (Pascale, 1984), and in removing those who do not fit (Sathe, 1983)." (p. 552)The mission did indeed use culture to redulate behavior in this way. Since there was virtually no functioning written policies, then culture and the informal organization had to fill in the gap. Personally, I really hate those kinds of organizational situations because those are exacty they types of situations where you're most likely to find manipulation and all kinds of junk going on where there's no real guidelines to fall back on. If the culture is acting in tandem with a substantial, healthy and robust formal organization and organizational policies, then that might be a different matter, but in the Vienna mission that was most definitely not the case. Culture was pretty much all we had, although my mentors helped some, mostly with technical things work-related but also with tips about the mission and getting settled in. I think, the tips could have been considered culturel-related.
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That was all I wanted to take from that article so I thought I'd do one other very short one right now:
Woodruff, Michael J. (1991, Oct.). Understanding - and combatting - groupthink. Supervisory Management, 36, p. 8
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"Want to make a stupid decision? It's easier if you have help. Just gather four or five like-minded colleagues together in an atmosphere that values getting things done, and you're on your way...
What is Groupthink?
Groupthink is a process of rationalization that sets in when members of a team begin to think alike. It can be fostered by managers who do not tolerate dissent, or it can develop under leaders who offer their employees so much encouragement and praise that pretty soon everyone begins to underestimate the seriousness of potential problems." (p. 8)
In the Vienna mission, however, they had a different way to reach groupthink, and that was by way of fear and learning deception for security's sake. I didn't agree with them and look how they treated me! There was absolutely no room for dissent at all. So you had to learn groupthink very early on in order to survive there, let alone prosper.
I'm not sure about the stupid decision part as applies to the mission. The main decisions, of course were not entrusted to the rank and file, so any of their groupthink issues would not have affected those decisions. The director, assistand director (my boss), the North American office director and all the other board members (representatives from member missions) would have been the ones making the big decisions. It's possible they might have had some group think in as much as there was some incestuousness among the missions since the world of East European missions was not that large and the major players tended to know each other and bump into each other or affect each other here and there. But I doubt it was as much groupthink as in the Vienna mission.
So the missionaries in the mission have so much of a groupthink mentality that they couldn't make a decision about anything major about the mision because they have so much groupthink. That's a pretty broad statement and I expect that some of the senior folk at the mission could probably have made a pretty good decision and maybe they could think for themselves all right. It's hard for me to imagine how they could live with the conflict between God's word and the lifestyle of the mission of deception. That is, if they could think for themselves but still stay at the mission and seem to be at peace and fully cooperate with the mission, how can they do this and get around this conflict?
In any case though there was a group think at the mission where they were all in union all one bit happy family and I suppose it's a good think then that they didn't have responsibility to large decisions, because the groupthink mentality might not have been so advantageous as far as wise decision-making is concerned.
