446. Military Chaplaincy, Pt. 53 (W.E. Smith, pt. 1)

I really am feeling crummy and it's a bummer.  I have just one more pod for the dishwasher and I want to get more from B.J.s, where I get the big container of them, but it's more of a trek out there, and I might not be up to it.  So I might just have to get a stop gap supply at the regular grocery store. 

I just get wiped out so easily  and I'm still dealing with the set back on my legs/back too, in addition to the chest congestion issue too (I have lowered immune system response because of being on a rheumatoid arthritis medication that has that as a side effect.) 

And I had all these projects I was just starting when these health things caved in, so that's not that great either.  It's nice having the steps up to the bath/shower and the bar installed.  So that was timely, at least.

This next article is:

Smith, Wilford E. (1977, Summer). Church and state in America in the twenty-first century A.D. Military Chaplaincy Review, 28-40.

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Wilford quotes Milton Konvitz at some length including this passage:

The Nuremberg trials establish the principle in international law that the defense of having acted pursuant to orders of the government or a superior does not absolve a defendant from responsibility.... (p. 31)

In introducing the second batch of Konvitz quotes, Smith says: "He goes on to argue that modern enlightenment is opening the way for man to question old ways and to stand boldly on his own feet." (p. 31)

The thing is that it this is a chaplain saying that this is how it should be in the military and these are things that chaplains need to bear in mind in their serving and ministering in the military.  So ultimately, if something horrible is done they have to have the guts to stand up to their superiors and say no they won't take part in it because it is wrong. 

There are several things going on here.  First of all, they have to be able to think for themselves, right?  Then they have to have values, which is not necessarily the same as just thinking.  So they have personal ideas as to what right and wrong are.  Then they can't be timit fearful beings, scared to stand up for what they believe in.  And there has to be some sort of opportunity, however large or small, for them to be able to act according to their conscience.

It's wonderful that this chaplain even brought it up, because my experience at the Vienna mission was such that I was scared to death to speak my conscience.  I avoided the most egregious to me conscience offenders, like what it would have taken to help socialize a new person. 

In the Vienna mission, as far as I could tell it seemed to me that groupthink was paramount.  Individuals had personalities, for sure, and that came out, but the group was always central and security was central and number one.

And I always have to come back to my own experience, because that's what I knew best, and all I knew was that anything that I did on my own seemed to increase my stress levels vis a vis my relationship with the mission.  And I never got the impression that the individual was ever supposed to think of him/herself seperate enough from the group to think in terms of this kind of responsibility as is described in this sentence about the Nurenberg trials. 

So in the end, just before I left Vienna, I was symbolicly accused of doing this by making me out to be the little boy who "was standing up on the inside" (when he finally sat down after the teacher's repeated instructions to do so).  I had thought of myself as too separate from the group, which was my mortal sin.  I was able to think for myself and decide right and wrong for myself and I would have even been able to stand up against an authority with my beliefs if I thought they were wrong (and I did altogether too often). 

But they didn't know that I disagreed with them in all these various areas.  All they knew was that I dared to be separate.  And that wasn't allowed.  It's allowed in the military, it seems, however.  At least enough so that this passage was put here.

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The rest of the article doesn't really have anything I want to comment on right now.  He talks about some church and state issues, but mainly speculating about what might happen, and it's not something I want to go into right now.

344. Organizational Behavior, Pt. 68 (Saffold, pt. 2; Woodruff, pt. 1)

I really shouldn't start writing these late at night, but I did prep it yesterday.

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.