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This next article is:Meyer, John P. & Allen, Natalie J. (1988). Linnks between work experiences and organizational commitment during the first year of employment: a longitudinal analysis. Journal of Organizational Psychology. 61(3), 195-209.
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"Such commitment to the organizaton has been found to correlate with a variety of work experience variables including confirmation of pre-entry expectations... job satisfaction..., participation in decision making..., role clarity..., and organizational dependability or concern for the workers..." (p. 196).
I think a whole book could be written about this alone! I'll take these variables one by one. I think it should be clear by now that my pre-entry expectations were just blown into the gutter practically as soon as I got off the plane, or at least as soon as I walked into the office. I've written about that all over the place on this blog so I won't go into that again here.
As to job satisfaction, I was willing to be a secretary for 2 years, but the deal was that I was going to be spending off hours working with Austrians and my sending mission assured me that they didn't think that would be a problem, although I don't think they asked the Vienna mission about that; they just assumed it was be okay and I took their word for it. If I had known that I was not going to have another outlet like that then I would not have agreed to be a secretary for 2 years because I knew I wouldn't be happy/satisfied with it.
Regarding participation in decision making, I've mentioned elsewhere that the Vienna mission was anything but democratic, so we did not have real participation in decision making. The department heads might have had some say or input in certain things, but we didn't. The mission ran a tight ship and it was mainly our jobs to obey, although we were supposed to take initiative to problem solve according to the license our particular position entitled us to.
Role clarity was okay (but not great) in that I pretty much knew what I was supposed to be doing, but I generally didn't feel like a significant part of the whole because of being moved around so much. That made me feel trivialized and insignificant, despite working with mission leaders much of the time.
As far as I was concerned the mission was NOT dependable and it did NOT care for me. It was only concerned for itself and most likely my dad, and I was just a pawn in the game. If I had agreed to play under the strictist of conditions they might have treated me differently, but only if I did that. And even then I didn't know what ever repercussions there might be down the line for me, such as from dad.
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"The early months of employment have been identified as a particularly important period in the development of work attitudes.... New employees enter organizations with naive optimism attributable, in part, to their educational experiences and the recruitment process..., and exaggerated by post-decision dissonance reduction processes... Unfortunately, early experiences often do not live up to expectations. This disconfirmation of expectation is credited with causing the documented decline in job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and high rates of turnover in the early period of employment. Among the biggest disappointments, particularly for university-educated employees, are the intrinsic aspects of the job, such as challenge, responsibility and opportunity for growth... Although these claims must be interpreted with some causion because of limitations in the research methodology..., they provide a basis for speculating that, if work experiences do have effects on the development of organizational commitment, these effects may be most easily detected in the early months of employment." (p. 197)In most places of employment, as described above, if an employee becomes disillusioned, the employee just quits and that's that. Do you think the Vienna mission could just let me become disillusioned (even if I didn't complain or otherwise express having a bad attitude)? Would the mission let this thing run it's usual course and let me quit if that's where it led to? Well, no! It had to, for some reason, intervene, having come to the conclusion that I had "culture shock" and send me back to the USA for treatment. So, for some reason, quitting from the Vienna mission was unacceptable; or at least that's how it appears.
I didn't think I was entering the mission with naive optimism, but in hindsight it seems I did. If naivete is relative, than I definitely entered the mission very naively, because I was not at all ready for what I met when I arrived there. Of course, once I started seeing and experiencing these things then I could look back and see that there were a few signs pointing to these things, but they still wouldn't have been enough to really prepare me for what I saw and experienced at the mission.
I'm thinking about the incident with the roommate, for example, when I had made it very clear to my sending mission that I didn't want a roommate and they passed that on to Vienna, so they knew. Then I was travelling around the country speaking to churches and in Denver I got a call from Anchorage from a gal preparing to go to Vienna to be a secretary and she was told we were going to be roommates. So I had to call to try to figure out what was going on and we had to straighten that out. And even when I got to Vienna they were still trying to make us be roommates! I just wanted to have a place of my own because I'd been moving around so much and it was something I needed, and it wasn't anything against her. I think they wanted us to be roommates because it would have made socialization easier, probably for both of us. That's my opinion.
The secretarial position definitely wasn't challenging for me, but moving around so much made it difficult for me to have very much responsibility for any single position I was in either, and I was always doing just the basic parts of all the positions so there wasn't that much opportunity for growth. There was the odd exception, but that's mostly how it was and this contributed to my feeling sort of degraded.
I guess the Vienna mission leadership hadn't read any of these articles to realize that any of my problems might have stemmed from the mission itself and the work it was giving me. I don't suppose that even if it had realized that it would have made any difference because it's not like the mission was going to change for me or anything. It wasn't going to say, "Oh, my! I guess we were wrong here in being the cause of your poor commitment. What can we do to rectify that situation, to help you have a stronger commitment?" Hah!
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From the discussion section, following the study:
"It also suggests that work experiences should be managed carefully in the first month of employment to set the process off in the desired derection." (p. 205)
Hah!
Let's just say that the Vienna mission actually did this, that they think that they were in fact carefully managing my work experiences the the first month. What kind of a commitment did they expect me to develop as a result of these experiences? It couldn't have been a very positive commitment, because all I was doing was reading software manuals. And I had 6 years of college under my belt. Not to mention various related experience.So there's not much of a chance I'd be very happy with it , I think.
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Okay, that's it for this article. Good night!
