What a tedious life I live now. I'm resorting back to my life as a toddler when mom said for the year when I was 2-3 and we were living at dad's mom's house in this real upscale neighborhood where the houses were far apart and I didn't have any friends to play with that she felt sorry for me but I was very good at just playing by myself. So here I am again. I wouldn't be here by choice, but health puts us in strange situations, doesn't it, and I can't complain, because even now I can look over my shoulder and there's a lake out the window, so it's not so bad, is it?
It is lonely though. That it is. Everyone says that no man is an island, but sometimes I feel like I am, not that I want to be.
The next text is:
Greenberg, Jerald. (1990). Organizational Justice: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Journal of Management, 16(2), 399-432.
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Historically, the equity theory of Adams... has been given the greatest attention by organizational scientests in issues of justice... This theory claims that people compare the ratios of their own perceived work outcomes (i.e., rewards) to their own perceived work inputs (i.e., contributions) to the corresponding ratios of a comparison other (e.g., a co-worker). (p. 400)First of all, as I've said before, since this wasn't a regular place of employment, the Vienna mission didn't dole out the same kind of rewards and the like as you'd find back home on the job. So you have to adjust it to the context at hand. Since new missionaries came in at various times it was, I think, hard for them to know if they were progressing on schedule or not because they didn't really have a cohort to compare themselves to. But once you were socialized then I think you more or less did. You could compare yourself to others in your department, for example. But I don't think this kind of thing was really encouraged because there had to be such a high level of trust and camaraderie that to think like that would tear that all down. So I doubt the mission would put up with that kind of thing. I wouldn't be surprised though if there was some of this fostering underneath the surface here and there in the mission. It would be the kind of thing where a certain individual was given a choice assignment when another person thought s/he would get it and really wanted it. That kind of thing. "Choice," of course, is all relative, and I couldn't even begin to tell you what that might be, just whatever that person thought it was.
Where this relates to me in the mission, for one thing, is that there would be no way for me to know that it was unusual to have been moved around so much from position to position except in comparison to everyone else... and I mean EVERYONE else. Absolutely everyone. From the director down to the gardener. I don't care who you are, no one absolutely no one except me got moved around as much as me. There was one girl that got moved around one time and she wasn't even a missionary and I got moved around 5 times. So that's equity theory for you. Now sit back and think really hard, do you think that I felt like I was treated with any equity by the Vienna mission those two years that I was with them?
If you guessed no, you are correct. Bingo. You're catching on.
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Individuals are theorized to adjust theor own or the comparison other's actual or perceived inputs or outcomes in order to change unpleasant inequitable states to more pleasant ones... These reactions may be classified as being either behavioral... or psychological... (p. 400-401)The thing with this was I wasn't sure of the causes of the inequitable states. It's a lot easier to make adjustments when you know what the causes are. In normal work situations you might have a bad work review or something of that nature and you're told up front what the issue is or if you applied for an inside job and didn't get it you might be able to find out why you didn't get it. But in my case it was not so easy.
And I didn't think I had really done anything wrong. They wanted my heart and soul and that was the theme I sort of came away with from those two years and felt I couldn't give them because I thought they would give me theirs in return and for being a Christian mission, despite their polished exterior they could be a monster inside. So short of giving them my heart and soul, what could I do, sort of play along, which is what I ended out doing. But it still didn't work, because they still moved me around.
If the issue ultimately was my dad (and his work in Star Wars at Boeing), then there wasn't anything I could have done to right things, no matter what I did.
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Research using simulated legal decisions consistently has found that verdicts resulting from procedures offering disputants process control were perceived as fairer and were better accepted than identical decisions resulting from procedures that denied process control (e.g., Walker, Lind, & Thibaut, 1979)This is the same kind of logic that kept me from wanting to trust the Vienna mission as far as any kind of grievance may have been concerned. I didn't see any possibility for this kind of "process control" - not one iota of it at all. Any semblance of it would have been simply a mockery of the term, with no real resemblance to the real thing. So you can see how much faith I had in the mission, my sending mission, and all the leadership involved. That really does pretty well give you an idea of where my faith in them was.
As additional research was conducted on this phenonomenon (for reviews, see Lind & Tyler, 1988, 1988; Tyler, 1987), it became clear that this finding was reflective of a more general tendency across a variety of settings for procedures granting control over the process of outcome attainment to be perceived as fairer than procesures that deny process control... (p.403)
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Whereas Thibaut & Walker... emphasized the importance of process control, the approach to procedural justice offered by Leventhal focused on other aspects of procedural justice. Specifically, Leventhal postulated that various procedural elements (e.g., the selection of decision-makers, setting ground rules for evaluating potential rewards, methods of gathering information, procedures for defining the decision process, procedures for appeals, safeguards against abuse of power, and the availability of change mechanism) are used to evaluate the fairness of outcome-distribution procedures. The fairness of the procedures, he asserted, is evaluated relative to their meeting several criteria: namely, the extent to which they suppress bias, create consistent allocations, rely on accurate information, are correctable, represent the concerns of all recipients, and are based on prevailing moral and ethical standards.So all of these things describe what was wrong at the Vienna mission in my opinion. But I have to explain myself, because otherwise it might not be on the surface immediately evident.
Well the selection of decision-makers hardly counts because it's just the people in the highest positions. People pretty much stayed in their positions, so it was just the obvious people, the director and assistant director, department heads, the Board, the H.R. department. So I'm not even going to deal with that one. The only thing there is that why are they having U.S. military chaplains run the H.R. department? I thought that was pretty darn strange. And that was an important issue for me because that could have affect regarding my dad's work. So that does lose some neutrality for me. If I need to feel like they were going to come up with fair decisions regarding my treatment, they (both of the chaplains/H.R. staff) would have to be taken off the team to make decisions about me.
But you know if they do that then what's going to happen is that the rest of the team that's left deciding my fate are going to sneak out the back door to consult with them anyway to know what to do with me. Sure, they're not stupid! These guys they chitchat in the hall all the time and my boss and his boss are just down the hall from them on the 3rd floor!
Most of these things are irrelevant, so I'm skipping them.
Procedures for appeals. This should have been in place long before I came to Vienna. It's really attrocious that it wasn't. I understand that it might have been a bit different with all of the missions involved, but there should have been some kind of a policy for how it started at the mission and when the sending mission got involved if it did. It's attrocious that there wasn't such a thing in place, but it's just along the same lines as not having a functional staff manual. I don't care what your asinine socialization says. The missionaries have rights too. So there should be a functioning staff manual that has in it clearly spelled out the procedures for appeals.
And here's my favorite: safeguards against abuse of power. The constitution of the mission needs to have a section in it that includes a section on the safeguards of the abuse of power. Maybe not. Unfortunately, the kind of abuse of power I experience in the mission is a slippery abuse of power and the only way it's going to get better is for people to do something - the missionaries, supporters, churchers, whoever.
On the outside it doesn't look like abuse of power. If you go to a meeting it doesn't look like abuse of power. But it's all encompassing to those who work there and if you just dare to cross it you'll soon find out what abuse of power looks like. If you stay in the good graces it's very nice, otherwise, and you can't see a thing. Everything looks normal. It might be, though, that those who were there when I was and saw how I was treated saw a glimpse of what the Mission was capable of. But everyone saw different pieces of how I was treated and heard different things about it - maybe the leadership even had an official story about me, explanation for my departure. So I expect everyone came to difference conclusions, and I was probably a bit of an enigma. But the thing was that how they had treated me was, in my opinion, an abuse of power. Sure I was in a foreign country away from where there would be witnesses I knew to verify what they did to me. But just because I am there does not give them liberties to treat me like that. Does not give them liberties to treat anyone like that. They treat everyone like that, it's just that others give in. That's an abuse of power if you ask me.
You can't say - "Hah, now there are no witnesses that this person knows so we can treat him/her however we want to get him/her to become the way we want to be!" That is abuse of power, plain and simple and that is what the Vienna mission did to me and I think it did it to everyone, really in its socialization. That's part of what it banks on for that process. It's not only being in a foreign country - it's not having witnesses; no one will believe you. It's you all alone against the big mission. Even couple and families aren't together all day and it may be hard to explain to each other what they are experiencing.
But the other thing is the values issue, if people are required to submit total faith and be completely open to being counseled according to the ways of the mission this leaves a huge opening for the possibility of the abuse of power and I am in no certain terms satisfied that there are any safeguards to protect against the abuse of said powers. The mission abused Scripture left and right - such as the use of Jeremiah 12:5 (which I have recently been referring to, that they used with me before sending me back to the US for counseling 5 months into my term with them), so we know that Scripture was not a good safeguard for them because they would have been just as likely to twist and turn it however they wanted to their own end. And these are theologians, I'm talking about, but they believed in ends justifies the means and this was one aspect of that philosophy in action.
I never saw the heart of the mission because I refused to accept their beliefs. That's the part of me that I worked hard to keep secret, that if they only knew all the things I disagree with them on they would have had me shot at sunset, so to speak. So they didn't know my thoughts, but they weren't there thoughts.
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However, given the general managerial context of the study, it was not surprising that several additional principles emerged. For example, rules regarding, "providing adequate information," and "assigning challenging and meaningful work" were among those principles reported by Sheppard and Lewicki's respondents, but which were not contained in earlier writings on justice. (p. 405)
Generally speaking, I don't remember there being a real problem with "providing adequate information." I always had enough information. And where there wasn't an incredible lot of information to go on, that was generally in a situation where I had some leeway to set some things up on my on to organize offices and the like. The one time where this could possibly be an issue if you count the time before I had arrived in Vienna and I asked them which word processor they used so that I could take a class in it before I came to learn it (this was in the '80s and I didn't know all the software). Then when I arrived in Vienna they set me up with a manual to learn the program and that's what I did for a few weeks at least.
However, "assigning challenging and meaningful work" is most defnitely a hot button issue. I was supposed to be the secretary of the assistant director, and I would say that I was fully functioning in that position maybe 6 months of the 24 months I was with the mission. The rest of the time was basically in this category. And my supporters were paying for it. How do you think I felt. Well I kept up a sunny disposition and didn't let on but it could feel like I was a joker or something. Who was I fooling, smiling when all this is happening? And the mission believed me? My parents even believed me. So you can guess how good of an actress I was, right?
I mean, really, imagine this. I take a women's trip to Vienna, finally. So now they know I can teach and they've seen me several times in Czechoslavia, so they finally see a little bit of what I can do. Then my parents come - sometimes I think they only sent me on the women's ministry trip because my parents were coming, so they could show them I was getting ministry opportunity.
Then practically as soon as they leave I'm ushered down to the receptionist position. Like it was all a show! How do you think I feel? I'm not stupid after all. I know what's going on. Remember I'm holding on to my old values and I don't agree with the mission's ways like everyone else anyway. So I can still think for myself. I just can't show it. So I have to do the thinking at home in my apartment where no one can see me.
I'm a fool. Really, that was my position in the mission. How can anyone not think that I could not have noticed this and somehow had to find a way to live with it or accept it or something. I would have hoped that those who knew me knew me well enough that they would have seen that doing that kind of work was antithetical to what I was capable of. The problem was that my parents didn't believe me that I had worked so hard to keep my identity intact.
[I'm writing this a couple days later. The problem regarding my parents believing me was two-fold. First of all, I couldn't express myself as clearly as I can with the help of these articles that are helping me understand what was happening even more than I did at the time. I mean, I did have some very specific consciousness of what I was doing but there was a huge amount of gray area where everything was a jumble and I was doing my best to make my way through the ambiguity and all. So if I couldn't understand it that well, how could I explain it to others? So that was a problem.
But the other issue was dad's work. There were, I think different ways how dad's work may have come in, and as soon as I was out of the way and not affecting dad's work any more, dad would have been glad to point the finger at me as being the problem to make sure that he's off the hook maybe, so that there couldn't possibly be any link to his work as having caused my problems. (But I came back so weak anyway that he hardly needed to worry about that one; I was hardly a threat to him at that point.)
On the surface he made it look like he saw this kind of thing all the time - how I was treated by the mission - and it was just a failure of nervous breakdown or the like, and he lost a lot of respect for me from that. Weakness was a big deal in his family, from his father's ingraining it in him and he passed this value on at least subconsciously this way to us kids as adults. on the other hand, I lost respect for him when I saw him doing this - responding to me in this way. Mom had said to me as a teenager that dad cared what people thought and now I was feeling the brunt of it, understood what she meant. On the other hand, he never abandoned me, but still, this type of thing wasn't good either, and it's messed up the family too. My one brother needs anger counseling but if he sees it as a weakness like this, he'd never in a million years get it, but that's how mom ended out getting emotionally and verbally abused. My other brother is controlling with his boys, but is certainly a lot better. There are lots of things that are worse than being weak, and my situation in Vienna was a particular situation that was unique especially and, honestly, I've been tested at universities up and down the East coast in recent years, despite having conditions that often have comorbidities with things like depression and all and I've been told that they can't find anything wrong with me or they pick at straws digging for things. So I'm emotionally healthy and that situation in Vienna was because of the stress they put me under and I pulled myself together and somehow managed to live a double life keeping my values. So that should tell you something that I'm not a complete psycho or something. Then a year after leaving the mission I started on my Masters and not long after that I went to live in Siberia, where I lived for several years.
But despite the fact that dad had labeled me (at least in part) a failure didn't change my values , because I didn't think that that was how people should be judged and it didn't change my tune as far as what I knew happened in Vienna, even if I had trouble expressing it to others. So this must be what babies feel like when they can't express themselves. It's really a terrible feeling. And when I came home from Vienna and I realized I was completely misunderstood by everyone I felt like a complete stranger there. But no one could fathom it. My family might have sensed I was a bit changed, but they probably thought I'd get over it or something. This is what I mean when I say my parents didn't believe me about keeping my identity intact. It's because they would have had to appreciate the attrocities of how the mission treated me, and I was having trouble explaining them, and same with the extent of the extent of the emotional aspects of what was going on, as well as the relations to dad's work, which dad may not have known about.]
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I'm going to end here. This article is going to have a lot more to comment on too.
