"Moderate Levels of Commitment" (instead of "Low Levels...")
And the sub-section is, predictably: "Positive Consequences for the Individual."
***
Picking up with the second paragraph..."However, a moderate level of commitment does not mean unbounded loyalty to the firm; at this level, individuals avoid being swallowed by the system and are able to fight for their identities as persons... Employees express what Schein (1968) called creative individualism - accepting only pivotal values and norms and rejecting those that are nonessential or harmful." (p. 464)
This sounds like me, pretty well. Now if churches send missions to the mission field, does it usually strike them that they expect the missionaries they send to the field to have to fight for their identities (with the organization!! - not with the country or "target people" - we're talking here about organizations only)? I don't think so. What was so wrong with my identity that it need such a major overhaul?
Well, so I basically had a moderate level of commmitment (at the most, certainly no more than this). One of my goals definitely was to avoid being swallowed by the systems because from the get-go (once I arrived in Vienna, that is, not really before, even though I had a couple warning signs earlier about them) I saw things that I most definitively did not like and disagreed with just hugely. So I did not want to become like them at all. So I guess in the end when I had to give in to thing at least it wasn't the things that had to do with deception, which mainly would have only happened if I were a true insider, anyway, I think. To have walked away with my sense of truth and falsehood intact was a miracle, let me tell you.
For me it was having to reject what I saw as "harmful" values and norms and ones that I disagreed with with strong conviction. It didn't matter to me whether or not the values and norms were pivotal to the mission or not; what mattered were whether I disagreed with them. And when I say disagreed with them with some conviction, I mean things that I read and studied about maybe in a class in college, maybe on my own knowing that these issues were pertinent to East European mission work. I really thought I'd thoroughly prepared for East European mission work, including things like that, like theological and ethical issues. And I knew about a lot of the history and social issues and political regarding believers in those countries. And I'd thought about different ramifications of different missions approaches and the like. And I'd studied and thought about what the Bible had to say about some of these issues too, so I rejected the mission's actions based on my interpretations of them and how that fit my value system. So this is how it would go:
1. The mission would do something.
2. I would look at the action within the context of the mission, its other actions, etc. and my value system.
3. I would come to a determination. If I though that the mission's action was incongruent with what I thought it stood for or how I thought it should be acting, I would step back and that would be a cause for moderate commitment to the organization.
The more these things added up the farther and farther away I'd slip from the mission and the more my moderate status would be secured. Eventually, I'd slip towards low levels of commitment because these things took too heavy of a toll. Sending me back to the States the 5th month of my time with the mission was a bad move if they ever had any hope of garnering my commitment.
***
The other sub-section are all here, just like for the low levels of commitment, but I don't have anything to say about them. So we'll move on to "High Levels of Commitment" and skip to the sub-section "Positive Consequences for the Organization."
"Some organizations (e.g., military units) view total and unquestioning commitment as not only desirable but also essential for accomplishing their goals (Hoffer, 1963). Due to their excessive devotion, highly committed employees willingly accept the organization's demands for greater production (Etzioni, 1975)." (p. 464)
As I've discussed in previous posts, the Vienna mission was a total institution. But that didn't get it off the hook from having to follow Biblical mandates, especially such as those about lying and related practices that they involved themselves in as a way of living, it seemed. So, whether or not the mission was a total institution, it still was fundamentally, at it's core, supposed to be an Evangelical Christian mission first and foremost. At least that's what I expected and that's the only way I would relate to it because it anything other than that was the truth than I actually would have none of it.
It seemed to me that to reach the core of the mission (to pass socialization) you had to agree to the deception approach to security, which right then and there meant that you were taking a huge step away from adherence to the Bible. It's not as if there aren't enough issues in our own (USA) culture that make it hard enough to do that and easy to just kind of cut corners here and there, but to enmass open yourself up to living a life of deception in contradiction to the Bible at the same time you're doing the work of the Lord? If Christian pastors want to become military chaplains it's possible they might have to become familiar with some of this, I don't know (and I have a file on chaplains too so I tried to figure them out a bit too), and certainly some precautions might need to be taken to protect the work and the people in volved in the ministry. But the lifestyle of deception and the lack of trust is too in God it showed is too much.
They were more worred about offending the other missions they worked with than they were about offending God! How is that for a good Christian mission! So they all agree to meet at the lowest common denomenator and they end out looking more like a spy agency than a Christian mission, at least to me. I'm talking about how they dealt with security issues and how security became mission #1, in my opinion. They just absolutely didn't trust me. I didn't do them any harm the whole time I was there and then at the end they all just stopped inviting me really left me out, even mom saw it when she came to help me move, and the only thing was that I hadn't reached their high level of commitment. [This is leaving out the issue of my dad, of course, which is a whole other can of worms.]
It does appear, however, that everyone else except me accepted the mission's demand for high levels of commitment, and everything that went with it, including the values and norms - and deception. I don't know how many people grappled with it. I do think that one of the secretaries had a bit of a time adjusting to the organization, but she never shared her thoughts with me, so I don't know what the issues were. Maybe I should have asked, but I had too much going on on my own end.
***
"Negative Consequences for the Organization"
"Case studies of illegal behavior illustrate the relationship of high levels of commitment to corporate crime. Investigations into the General Electric price-fixing conspiracy (Geis, 1967, 1982), the cover-up of the side-effects oticholesterol drus HE/14 (Carey, 1978, Lockheed's involvement in foreign and domestic illegal payoffs (Clinard & Yeager, 1980) and tng carto price conspiracy lasting from 1960 to 1974 (Clinard & Yeager, 1980) revealed employees so committed to the firm that illegal behavior to benefit the employer was viewed as acceptable. Any deviation from standard operating procedures were not questioned by those employees.
Typically, employees who committed illegal acts willingly put organizational interests above their own." (p. 466)
I am sitting here desperately trying not to gloat. Really, this is no occasion to gloat because it is a horrible thing. The point is that this kind of thing happens. Look at it, look at these examples, right under our noses thousands of people have been involved in these kinds of things, so why not missionaries who are desparately trying to figure out a way to reach these people and they don't think they can see another way but to deceive or who knows what else - since they have a U.S. military chaplain on staff and one of the missions on their board took money from the C.I.A., so it could even be worse than I imagine, and that's, of course what I feared down deep, especially since they seemed to be so without conscience regarding these things.
Do you see it? Do you see what I mean? The missionaries were so committed to the mission, to the organization and to the goal, to what they're trying to do that they were willing to, well, bend the biblical rules a bit, if you will, just like the people in all those case studies in this text broke legal rules. So you have missionaries breaking biblical rules in the same type of process. I think it's one way of looking at it, although it certainly might not be adequate to explain enough of what went on in the mission, but it explains at least some of it or from one angle, I think. It's a big help.
And I was not going to become highly committed to the mission when I saw some of the dishonesty and discrepancy right from the beginning in what they were doing and saying and how I thought missionaries and Christians should act and talk. But I think this is what I mean when all along I've been saying that the mission required total commitment because this is what they wanted this very thing right here, do you see? Because these "negative consequences to the organization" in the case of the mission were actually positive consequences for them for security reasons (that's my understanding of it). So it was all warped, like living in a different world with its own warped rules.
So what for most organizations would have been negative repercussions of certain warped forms of high commitment, were to the mission actually positive and even mandatory qualities, which I refused to take on for myself because I disagreed with enough of what I was seeing of the mission that I didn't want to make myself that vulnerable to it. Also, however, I didn't think that anyone had the right to ask that level of commitment of me except God and I questioned the right of them to be so intent on having that amount of power over anyone. That's not the same as saying I wanted to rebel; it's just that God remained at the top and they were not going to usurp Him. That means I always have the right to go to the Bible and determine for myself whether or not something is sin or not and the mission doesn't have the right to twist something (which they were good at to explain away the use of deception and lying and the like) and force me to into their lies or whatnot.
Wow, I really hope you understand this, because I think this really helps bring some things together.
