"Personal moral standards concerning a particular mode of conduct are established when a person internalizes expectations of others concerning this behavior." (p. 420-421)
Then he goes on to say that reinforcements and punishments are eventually no longer needed to maintain the organizational values.
This is what I've been saying all along was the end product of socialization in Vienna, the internalization of the mission's values and norms, to the point where they didn't need guidance any more. The mission couldn't afford to watch everyone, especially since people were traveling in and out of Eastern Europe, or even back home sometimes. And there was a lot of stress and people needed to be able to trust each other. That was more or less their position, I think, granted simplified significantly, which probably means I overlooked some significant aspects of the reasoning.
The mission basically was acting like the world. It took on a worldly guise, in my opinion. You can say it was a seminary. You can say it was a mission. You can say it was a publisher. And yes, in part it was all of these. But it acted above all else like a spy agency, no less. So it took on the guise of a spy agency and all the security trappings, minus the budget and technology, perhaps, but with everything else it could muster. That's why they had no conscience about deception and lying about treating me so badly, about any of these things... because it was just all a part of their work and they were hardened to it. I really was never ever so afraid of the Communists, even in Siberia as I was of them. I was terrified of them.
I think I better stop there or I'll really get into a digression.
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"Organizational commitment is viewed as the totality of internalized normative pressures to act in a way that meets organizational goals and interests. The stronger the commitment, the stronger is the person's predisposition to be guided in his actions by such internalized standards rather than by a consideration of the consequences of these actions." (p. 421)Just because I didn't have all the missions values and norms internalized, however, didn't mean that I was guided by a concern for the consequences. You have to remember that this is a Christian mission and not a for-profit corporation or something. I was guided by my zeal and my commitment to the goal of the mission (as proclaimed publicly and told me before I arrived). Anyone likes to be told they're doing a good job every once in a while, but that's not what I did it for, so that's irrelevant in this case and I think pretty much for everyone probably at the mission.
So that means the trade off wasn't between consideration of consequences or internalization but internalization and something else. So the mission leaders had to displace that something else with the internalization. Maybe for the seminarians it was mostly one things and for the secretaries it was mostly another thing, I don't know. If that was the case, maybe I was an oddball in the group.
Maybe for everyone it was zealous idealism, but for the seminarians it had more of a theological bent and for the secretaries it had more of a lay person's more or less uneducated bent. And for me it had a somewhat theological bent (not as much as the seminarians) and a European studies/Easter Eurpean religion specialist bent. So the theologians and secretaries would be approached one way, but I was a separate animal never having been met before, I'm pretty sure. So they would have to have come up with a totally different way to get me to internalize their values and norms.
If they really wanted to get me to internalize their values and norms. They couldn't just shoot all my values down. I would not ever be willing to internalize their norms and values that way. I come to my values and norms through much thought, study and deliberation and I do not respond to force to change them. So they would have to show respect. Now already I'm talking crazy because the mission would never ever in a million years to any of that. They were the ones who told you what to do and things weren't negotiable, it wasn't like they were going to respect anyone's values or anything. That's ridiculous. They should just have been upfront with me in the first place before I before I went through all the trouble to raise support to go over there.
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"[A] behavioral pattern resulting from commitment must possess in varying degrees, depending on the strength of commitment, the following characteristics: (1) It should reflect personal sacrifice made for the sake of the organization; (2) It should show persistence - that is, the behavior should not depend primarily on environmental controls such as reinforcement s or punishments; and (3) It should indicate a personal preoccupation with the organization, such as devoting a great deal of personal time to organization-related actions and thoughts (Wiener & Gechman, 1977)." (p. 421)Even though I didn't really have the internalization of the missions norms and values, I did fulfull some of these. I did make personal sacrifice in my entertaining efforts and sort of mentoring my boss's daughter and things like that. The norms and values that I had accepted and internalized (mainly practical things, rather than more substantial values issues), I don't think I had a problem in needing to be watched to maintain. Number 3 is more problematic in that the time I spent thinking about the mission was more like trying to figure it out and things like that, so I'm afraid I can't count that one.
This exercise is pretty revealing. So doing number one is almost like a front or something. The thing is that the things I could agree to were the things I acted out, but those were the shallow things and those were only the individual things, not the mission as a whole, whereas then number 3 deals with mission-wide, and, of course, I'd just pretty well lost it with the mission I was so disillusioned with them. So I was just acting on the specific things I can agree to.
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Next time we'll start another section in this article.
