381. Commitment, Pt. 23 (Wiener, pt. 5)

The next section of this Wiener article is "Commitment and Instrumental Motivation."

"Proposition 1: The more the organization tends to apply symbolic and normative control on individual behavior (i.e., normative organization), the greater becomes the importance of commitment in determining behavior.  The more organization tends to apply material control (i.e., a utilitarian organization), the greater the importance of instrumental motiation (Etzioni, 1961)." (p. 425)

The Vienna mission was the former - a normative organization. Although the leaders were sort of a buck stops here authorities, because there was so much at stake security wise we all were potential narks on each other.  Of course, as long as you were "playing by the rules" there shouldn't be any problems.  If there was an accidental slip or there was something you hadn't been informed of, that would generally be no big deal and you'd be informed (hopefully it wouldn't be be in Eastern Europe or something major). 

***

"Proposition 2: The greater external-environmental threats are to the organization and its members, the greater becomes the importance of commitment.  The lesser such threats are, the greater is the influence of instrumental motivation.  In stress situations, dependency of individuals on others increases, as in Schachter's (1959) study.  Therefore, normative pressures become more salient." (p. 425-426)

The Vienna mission was working in atheistic countries, many of which were (more or less) committed to wiping out all religion.  As such, the mission worked under conditions of threats.  When you add to that the posbility of some government connections, like at the very least U.S. military chaplians on staff, then the ante increases even more because then you have two (the USA and whatever East Bloc government) antagonistic governments facing off. To me that smacks of fairly high external-environmental threats.  Predictably, the mission did have a normative value structure.

***

"The conceptualization of commitment in this paper is founded on the premise that work behavior may be determined not only by calculative-instrumental processes, but also by normative pressures such as personal moral standards.  Such internalized pressures, once established, exert stable, long term influences on behavior that are independent of situational circumsances and linkages to rewards on punishments." (p. 426)

This is exactly what the Vienna mission did and wanted in its workers.  It had to be able to rely on everyone to have the norms and values internalized just as here described.  This is what I've been trying to say, described in a different way here.  It's exactly what the mission did.  I can't say whether or not the mission and the leadership had thought through all this logic of it or not, but I'm sure they knew they had to be able to trust everyone and everyone had to know the rules reliably.

And  here's another things that I'm not sure whether the mission had thought about or not, but would make sense.  Some of the things weren't public knowledge, weren't things they'd let you put in your prayer letter, for example, right? I just want to make sure we're on the same page with that there. 

I'm going to go back to my ESL teaching days.  In language - any language, even whatever your native language is - you don't think about all the rules of the language when you think, do you?  No!  You just think and you sot of forget the rules, they're just sort of in the background somewhere helping you formulate your language or understand writing or listening, right?

Well, maybe that kind of thing could even have been useful for the Vienna mission too.  After all, it didn't have much of a socialization system anyway.  So a lot of your learning is learning by watching what others do and by example.  So you don't really ever learn some of the rules, you just sort of absorb them by osmosis.  Maybe for the ones that could be controversial this would be a nice way to get around it, what do you think?  So long as the person doesn't notice it, maybe it'll just glide by.  So that's one controversial rule down, 100 to go.  And you wouldn't even think of putting it in your prayer letter because it's non-news. 

Although my B.A. was in European Studies, I'm afraid I had to spend more time observing North Americans to figure them out than I did Austrians while working with the mission in Vienna.

That concludes this article.

380. Commitment, Pt. 22 (Wiener, pt. 4)

I'm really doing a lot worst physically than I have been today.  My legs are not good, my migraine is bad, my lumbar hurts and my fibromyalgia is kicking in and I want my RS Medical RS 4i e-stimulator back (it needed a new battery so I had to send it across the country to the manufacterer).

I don't have any stamina, so I'm getting up in spurts to do things. 

Here's my next installment on this Wiener article, still on this same chart.

***

These next texts are from the sub-section "Organizational Socialization" (still in the main section "Antecedents of Organizational Commitment").

"One of the two basic determinants of commitment - generalized values of loyalty and duty - cannot be significantly modified by organizational interventions.  The second determinant, however, individual-organizational-organization value congruency, can be affected by organizational practices, particularly 'expressive' organizational socialization.  Such sociational (Etzioni, 1961) refers to the process by which the values, norms, and beliefs of members are brought into line with those of the organization." (p. 424)

I wasn't going to quote that whole paragraph, and then I thought that there were some things that maybe it would be worth discussing.  The authors here assume that "generalized values of loyalty and duty" are aspects of individuals that are pretty well set an not liable to be changed, certainly at least not in the course of something like socialization.  This may be true for the usual socialization in the average company.  And research probably supported this and was performed on students or mostly white males in Fortune 500 corporations, right?  Well, the Vienna mission didn't quite fit that profile and neither did I (white male, at least the male part of it).  So scrap the research and lets look at what was going on in the Vienna mission.

If you remember correctly, I've demonstrated that the Vienna mission was a total institution.  As such it probably was in a position where it could very likely have managed to garner a person's loyalty or bolster his/her sense of duty if it wasn't quite up to snuff.  So I don't think that in the case of the Vienna mission that these things were beyond modification, even significant modification.  The thing is that probably most people who came there wouldn't need a lot of modification I don't think.  Most of them would have applied themselves enough to have gone through gradue school and this was a nonprofit and a religous one at that, so you had a lot zealous people there who had just spent a year going around to churches selling themselves and the work of the Vienna mission to churches and individuals.  So that take a lot of loyalty and sense of duty just to do that.  Granted, once you actually get there and the work is somewhat less glamorous your sense of duty and loyalty could be tested in a different way, though.  But I still think that it is not beyond changing and growing.  Over time one's values in these areas can change and I think that because of the nature of the Vienna mission that it was in a position to affect them whereas maybe other organizations might not have been as much.

As for myself, I think my generalized sense of loyalty and duty pretty much remained the same throughout, so that is one thing that did, and enabled me to continue to do my work and want to do a good job.  When I looked back I could say that no matter what they did to me I did all to the glory of God.  I did my best.

On to the value congruency issue.  I'm not sure what exactly they were trying to do, but whatever it was, they ended out driving me from them.  I started with value congruency, but not knowing the totality of their values, then they began the socialization process a way that drove me from them and the parts of those other values that I caught glimpses of. 

I've already gone over the Espionage file so you know, if you've looked at any of those posts, that everyone has their weak point.  Well, and that's why we as Christians are told to "put on the full armor of God" (Eph. 6:10-18) so that we can withstand temptations from Satan (but not all temptations are from him, they can also be from our "flesh" or old nature and "the world" apart from God).  So the thing is that these guys if they really wanted to win me over they used completely the wrong way and I have my weaknesses (some of which I've shared here before, some of which they probably wouldn't use because they really were sin.).  Coming at me with force - as in appearing to force me to do something - or lying, or wasting my time, and things like that were not the way to go.  Those were demeaning and I wasn't going to respond to them, which I guess they learned.  So it wasted all of our time and money. 

Of course, if that was all they had to offer and that was the only way they could think of to relate to me then, of course, we were a bad fit,and that was all there was to it.  I wish I would have known before I got there though.  Otherwise, if they had approached the socialization process differently and had at the same time allowed me more expression of my gifts, maybe I wouldn't have moved into value incongruency.  Of course, the clincher was when they sent me to the USA for "culture shock" (!) counseling (when it was organization shock in reality).

As to being brought in line with "those of the organization," for the mission, that meant being brought in line with the other missionaries, and that's when I found out that I was going to be in a straight jacket, which I detested.  To me being a secretary was a job, and that was it, period.  It wasn't an identity, but they turned it into that.  So that was hard to swallow too.

***

"Not all potential members of a given organization are likely to benefit equally from socialization... Some individuals, such as those in cells E and F, are not likely to develop commitment under any condition." (p. 424)

Once I moved to Alienation (E or F, whichever) I think I was pretty much a lost cause to the mission.  After that point my external life was completely separte from what was going on inside me.  So I lived a double life for the duration of my stay in Vienna, but no one knew it, because I was scared to let anyone know, until I was leaving, then I let mom know, when she was helping me pack up, but I thnk she only partly believed me.

***

"Other individuals, such as in cells A and B, do not need to go through a socialization process to build commitment.  Their values and beliefs arelready highly congruent with those of the organizations.  Socialization processes, howeer, are necessary to enhance the strength or quality of commitment for individuals in cells C and D." (p. 424)

The thing was that I thought I was in cell A.  I think as pertained to the Vienna mission A and B should broken down into A1 and A2 and B1 and B2.  A1 and B1 would correspond to A and B regular as we've been using it.  But A2 and B2 would include significant experience in Eastern European missions.  That would inude, for example, my neighbors who had come from another mission having spent several years already working in Eastern Europe, including living in Romania.  So these people knew the ins and outs of what was what wit these missions very seriously and first hand.  I had pretty good theoretical knowledge (probably about equal to a Master's degree - I'm speaking from having 2 master's degrees in other subjects now) and some practical experience, including some gained on my own without the leadership of a mission.  But to be on the A2 or B2 level you really would have to have had serious long-term work in Eastern Europe with one of the missions cooperating in the Vienna mission.  Nothing else, I don't think, could be substituted for that experience.  That's the only way you could know the "secret" inner values to know whether you might agree with them or not, whether they would be problematic for you or not. 

So looking back up at our text again, we'd have to rephrase it for the Vienna mission that individuals in cells A2 and B2 might not need socialization (except for building commitment yada yada...).  Everyone ELSE like myself, would have to fit in with the C and D cells as requiring socialization, although maybe not necessary exactly of the same nature.  C and D might need more.  But still, it is not certain that individuals other than A2 and B2 will agree with the non-public values, so virtually everyone is a potential E or F, Alienation, like I became.

The thing is that the mission has developed a very persuasive case for its position, one that is very difficult to turn down.  And if you do it lets you know that there are potential consequences, maybe like I experienced, that are enough to scare the bejeeebers out of you and make you acquiesce which might not be the kind of word they'd like to have used about their socialization prcess.  Let's just say that I didn't acquiesce and it pretty much ruined my life.  I can't blame the mission for everything, but I can sure blame a lot of things on the mission.

***

"First, at least in the initial stages of membership in the organization, cognitive-instrumental and affective evaluations of members should be positive.  That is, the organization mus carry out effective instrumental-motivational programs andreate conditions conducive to job satisfaction.  A sociatlization process is not likely to result in success if organizationally relevant feelings and beliefs are negative." (p. 425)

Well, they did to this, for about maybe 3 or 4 days.  I arrived in Vienna, came to work on the second or third day and began settling in, but I had to regiser my address, get an apartment (because they still had me living with the other secretary).  So early all this stuff started falling apart; thy had me reading software manuals and not really doing anything.  It was crazy.  No, the negative things started very quickly.  I do remember people at first being excited about seeing me, but on the other hand there was all this other stuff going on.   My computer started acting strange and no one else's was so I didn't say anything and I'd never experienced anything else like it, so I knew it was something they were doing intentionally (through a network or whatever).  So much for being positive... well the evaluations of me were always positive.  No one ever said anything negative about my work - or attitude, either (despite what I might be thinking).

It turned out with me that the mission reaped what they sowed.

***

I think next time I can finish this article.

379. Commitment, Pt. 21 (Wiener, pt. 3)

At physical therapy today I had to cut short a couple of my exercises because I wasn't doing well.  So I ended out on heat the last 10 minutes.  I had to run errands on the way home, but ever since I got home I've really been feeling crummy.  Between the migraine and my lumbar I'm not doing well.  I'm not walking well, I'm in pain and I just really feel crummy.  I was having more trouble walking for getting around the grocery store, but not quite bad enouh to use one of those electric carts.

I'm going to try to do another post though. I just hate it when my health slows me down.

***

Now in this article we're on a different section, leaving the Fishbein model behind.  This main section is titled: "Antecedents of Organizational Commitment."

"The immediate determinants of commitment are two types of internalized normative belief held by members: (1) generalized loyalty and duty, and (2) organizational identification.  Identification can be affected by practices of selection and organizational socialization.  Loyalty and duty, however, may be affected only by selection process. Thus, commitment is influenced by both personal predispositions and organizational interventions." (p. 422)

I think that when I arrived in Vienna I had reasonably strong "generalized loyalty and duty" and was also primed for strong organizational identification.  However, the socialization process had a strictly negative affect on my organizational commitment, so that whatever organizational commitment I had when I came with - from my personal predisposition and from the selection process - was largely undermined because of the mission's choice of socialization tactics.

***

The next quote is from a sub-section "Immediate Determinants."

This is a little bit tricky, but I'll try to summarize it a bit.  There's a table with 3 basic components that can range (low, high, medium, negative, etc.).  They are, values congruent, values irrelevant, and values incongruent.  Those are on the left hand columns (y-axis if it were a diagram).  On the top you have generalized loyallty and duty.  So then they meet in the squares to make the various combination options.  For example, values congruent + generalized loyalty and duy high = strengh: high & type: balanced (no change).

This is where it starts getting a little messy, so if it sounds a little confusing, don't be surprised.
 "Commitment was shown to be a function of internalized normative beliefs... These, in turn, may be seen as comprised of two distinct types of beliefs.  First is the belief by an individual that he has a moral obligation to engage n a mode of conduct reflecting loyalty and duty in all social situations in which he has significant personal involvement.  Such a person tends to believe that it is 'right' to be loyal, for example, to his family, country, friends, and quite likely to his work organization as well. his type of normative pressure is termed generalized values of loyalty and duty.  The second type of normative beliefs include any internalized beliefs by a person that are consistent with organizational missions, goals, policies, and style of operations." (p. 432)

Again, these are antecedents to organizational commitment, so these would be things, for example, that I might have possessed before I arrived in Vienna to work with the mission.  The "moral obligation" mentioned here might be paraphrased "Protestant work ethic" as relates to the work place, and I did have that instilled pretty strongly from my upbringing.  Also, it was the normative beliefs that were most akin to my pre-existing ones that I accepted from the mission in the end, the others - as far as I knew of them -  I rejected it.  I didn't accept the mission's logic and agree to the parts of their values, norms and practices that I knew of.

***

This next quote is in the sub-section "Strengths and Types," also still discussing the same table.

"The two immediate determinants are largely, but not entirely, independent.  As long as the dimension of value congruency is not negative, the two dimensions should combine additively to determine the strength of commitment.  However, when the dimension of value congruency is negative, regardless of the level of generalized loyalty and duty, the individual may experience 'alienation.' " (p. 423)

I came to Vienna fully expecting that I had finally found a mission (especially my sending mission) with whom my values clicked, and I was very committed wo the work of the mission, and had no doubt that I was in for the long haul, that this was it.  In this case my initial commitment was somewhere in the medium to high range, because as far as I knew my values were congruent with the missions (both of them - my sending mission and the Vienna mission).

However, when I arrived in Vienna, as I've said repeatedly here, I soon learned that it appeared that there must have been some different values at work to explain what was happening around and to me.  So then it rather quickly became clear that our values were incongruent, although how much and exactly what theirs entailed I think would only be revealed once you became an insider, which somehow didn't seem reason enough to entice me.  So before you know it I was experiencing alienation. 

Incidentally, people don't like to hear about those kinds of things - alienation.  They want to hear about success and how much money you make and stuff like that.  A bit like what the Bible calls "tickling the ear" as in:

2 Timothy 4:3

New International Version - UK (NIVUK)

³ For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather round them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 

 But that's how thing's where, there's no getting around it: I was experiencing alienation.  And it just so happened that the alienation was regarding things that I wasn't going to bend on.  These were things that I had studied and come to strong convictions about, especially concerning East European ministry, but not only.  Maybe for the other missionaries it would be like someone demanding that they start practicing infant bapsism; or if that wasn't an issue, something else.  In such a case they, the theologians in particular, would have developed strong  reasonings for why they believed as they did on that issue and they could have stood their ground mentally even if they, like myself, didn't feel it wise to verbally make an issue of it.  (In these cases, though, they'd have whole denominations that would side with them - in the case of denominational missions - because they'd also be up in arms, so this isn't  perfect example; I didn't have that luxury.)  

When I went back to Bible school the second year the whole reason for that was to hash out issues I had regarding mission work in Eastern Europe.  So I spent a whole year - plus some time before that - dealing with these issues.  On my own, I might add, so I didn't have anyone to steer me in the direction missions might like me to go in.

***

"When commitment is based primarily on generalized loyalty and duty, it can be viewed as 'blind loyalty' When value congruency plays a major role in determining commitment it can be termed 'moral obligation.'" (p. 423)


These sentence is referring to two of the squares in the figure, the one in the top right and the one in the center left (there are two columns of 3 rows each, not counting the column and row headings).  The things with "Blind Loyalty" is that "Values Irrelevant" is part of that row, and I don't think that could ever be said of the Vienna mission, so I dought that either of the squares in this row would apply to the Vienna mission, at least as far as any of the regular missionaries are concerned.  Rather, I thought there was a strong values congruency, certainly the theology was congruent.  So I thought I was going to Vienna with a "Balanced."  I'm probably getting ahead of myself here though.

I think that when I was just starting to be uncertain about the mission I probably fit into this square, because it was no longer a high level of generalized loyalty and duty but I wasn't yet to the point where I thought our values were ingrongruent: I was just starting to watch and try to figure out what was going on.


So I think I came to Vienna as a Square A: (Strength: High, Type: Balanced), quickly moved to become a Square B: (Strength: Medium, Type "Moral Obligation").  After the fith month with the mission, when they sent me to the USA I moved to "Alienation," but I'm not sure whether I was i square E) or F) (high or low generalized loyalty or duty, where E) = High & F) = Low), but both are values incongruent.

***

The next sub-section is "Recruitment and Selection."


"Commitment-oriented recruitment relies strongly on expressive communications and appeals to values and beliefs.  Similarly, commitment-oriented selection focuses on assessment of values and beliefs, and on the degree of their congruency with organizational values.  Such an orientation is typical to normative organization." (p. 424).


All of the missionaries (or 95% of them) come through sending missions, which means they get processed along with missionaries going to Zimbabwe, Italy, Australia, Bolivia, Thailand, etc.  As you can maybe imagine, the recruitment might not necessarily always have been  as focused specifically on what the Vienna mission might have been needed (as far as recruitment issues are concerned).  And it's possible that in a case like mine the sending mission might not have known that the H.R. director (a U.S. military reserves chaplain) knew that my dad worked for Boeing as a manager in SSDI and maybe had certain instructions regarding me.  I've talked about this before, though.  


And the other thing is that even if the Vienna mission directly recruited missionarries itself, maybe through local offices or touring reps or whatever, how likely to do you think it is that they would be talking directly about their inner "values and beliefs"?  In my view the likelihood is zilch.  In my view they'd be more likely to test potential recruits on trust and taking orders and the like, so that they'd get a feel for how well they might take to adjusting to the regime (!).  


I'm not saying I agree with that or anything; I'm just saying that's what they'd do, because there's no way they'd go public with who they really were.  They even tried to confuse me, for Pete's sake!  So if they didn't want me to know, then how do you think they'd let a potential recruit in on such "secrets" when they hadn't even set foot in Vienna yet?  


Getting back to the text, though... he mission certainly had values, tons of them.  However, they were mostly shared indirectly and learned by example and through stories of what others had done and what was praised.  So you learned what was good and sort of hopped on the bandwagon.  In that way it was sort of a positive thing.  There was a big push to keep things positive as much as possible - although that doesn't mean that life's hardships were ignored.  It's just that complaining, grumbling and that cort of thing were not accepted and would need to be dealt with behind closed doors and nipped in the bud.  After I was sent to the USA I never complained or grumbled at all because I'd learned to keep my thoughts to myself.


Because the mission does not reveal its "hidden values" it makes opens (up front) selection based on theology and those kinds of values and beliefs, but as to the other "hidden values" it has to find other ways to try to ascertain if it thinks the recruit will accept the full cocktail of its values, norms and ways, and generally do this without the recruit particularly knowing s/he is being tested because the mission doesn't want to reveal the "hidden value".  Sometimes, as in my case I think, the sending mission might not even be aware of this going on.  I think the issue with the roommate might have been such a situation.

***

"First, type E and F individuals should not be selected or recruited.  Second, if the organization does not plan to carry out a significiant socialization program subsequent to selection, only type A and B individuals shuld be recruited and selected. Finally, type C and especially type D individuals should be recruited only if socialization is planned. " (p. 424)

E & F are the alienation squares, where values are incongruent with the organization.  That's where I ended out.  The mission had an informal socialization system set up.  I'm not sure how it worked throughout the mission, but I think it generally involved a mentor or mentors (plural).  There may have been certain "tests" set up for the individual, possibly highly individualized depending on what the mission already knew of the person and their personality, weak spots, as well as the work they'd be doing.

Like I already said, just a few paragraphs ago, I think I came as a square A with values congruent and high generalized loyalty and duty, so I should have been a good pick, right?  At least based on these criteria alone.  But that was just based on what I knew of the mission, and I didn't know that there was so much of an underworld.  It's one thing to have a certain security protocol and it's quite another to have a whole underworld, which is what they had, and it was too much for me to swallow hook line and sinker.   So this theory doesn't take into account these things where information available changes the whole ball game.

When I arrived in Vienna I acted just as I said I would in conversations with my sending missions and there were no surprised there and I didn't think I was doing anything to compromised my work at the Vienna mission, but they, evidently understood otherwise or just plain didn't like it for one reason or another (I've discussed this elsewhere at length).

But when I came they had things set up that unsettled me and made me trust them less and sending me to the States was the last straw so I switched to a values incongruent, alienation - square E or F, depending on how strong my loyalty and duty was.

So their actions - my response to them - moved me from an ideal recruit to a nightmare recruit, practically overnight.  Was it avoidable, or was it the way things were and it was inevitable because of what was expected of me?  How much of it was due to interference from my father's work?

***

I started this yesterday, but I couldn't finish it last night - I just wasn't feeling up to it.  Physical therapy really did me in and it was just one exercise in particular.  And now I can't believe it's so late today.

I still have one or two posts left on this article.

378. Commitment, Pt. 20 (Weiner, pt. 2)

The next section in the part of the article describing Fishbein's model is "Organizational Commitment."  He starts out describing the process of transitioning to organizational commitment.  That's the context of the following sentence:

"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.

***

 "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.

***

"[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.

***

Next time we'll start another section in this article.

377. Commitment, Pt. 19 (Wiener, pt. 1)

I've been sort of dragging me feet on doing this article.  Hopefully it won't be as difficult as I think, but here goes:

Wiener, Yoash. (1982). Commitment in organizations: a normative view. Academy of Management Review. 7(3), 418-428.

***

The author begins with first describing the contrasting view: the identification approach to commitment, which he says is "the most prevalent in guiding commitment research" (p. 418).

"The identification approach postulates commitment to be an attiduinal intervening construct, mediating between certain antecedents and outcomes, and views this attitudinal  process as primarily affective, rather than cognitive-calculative..." (p. 418)

I merely include this definition (or at least the author's initial part of it) to give you a frame of reference.  That's the kind of article this is; you're going to need frames of references, and I'll do my best to accommodate.

***

 "Research guided by the identification approach attempted, for the most part, to ascertain antecedents and outcomes of commitment.  Essentially three classes of variables seem to emerge as antecedents of commitment.  The first category includes personality-need variables and value orientations....

The second category of antecedents includes job characteristics and work experiences such as job challenge, feedback, opportunity for social interaction, task identity, group attitudes, and organizational dependability...

A third category of antecedents of commitment includes personal-demographic variables, particularly age and tenure..." (p. 418-419)

The first one is a little different than what we've discussed before, and the rest of the paragraph that I didn't include here especially makes that clear.  It's basically asking the question, am I the kind of person who would fit in here?

It's actually quite ridiculous to think I should have fit in well when you think of it.  As far as I know I was the only one of the secretaries with a B.A., although the director's secretary might have had a B.A..  But I'm certain I'm the only one who had any graduate studies and certainly the only one with the kind of East European or mission background.  So to think that they could tether me to the mission and the secretarial role was ridiculous, unless the mission wanted that very thing to make the position unpalatable to me and make me want to leave (which would be better for my dad's work).  In this case everyone seemed more concerned about protecting the US military than about whether or not my call to God's service could be heeded or not.  My friend in Russia had it right: I was just a pawn.

I don't really have anything new to add to the second category about job characteristics, as that's been dealt with enough elsewhere, including regarding commitment.

As to "personal-demographic variables," I don't think they made any difference particularly, unless you count being a U.S. citizen and the daughter of my father as a demographic variable.  Other than that I don't think there was anything particularly of issue here. 

***

Next Wiener begins to develop a case for the normative view of commitment, and starts with "Fishbein's behavioral intentions model".  After spending about a paragraph and a half describing a fairly complex model (figure 1 in the article) he has this to say:

"The utilitarian, calculative, and self-oriented character of the attitudinal process underlying the approach is apparent." (p. 420)

I don't know about you, but put that way, it sounds down-right sinful.  That's the initial reaction, anyway, looking at just that sentence.

The thing is, though, that while I did have emotional responses to the mission and what I experienced and witnessed while I was there, I wouldn't have been able to take a stand if it was just emotional.  So it was the cognitive, informed knowledge aspects that made me really hold on and take a stand.  My views did evolve some while I was there, though, as I gradually understood more and my thinking more or less clarified about what was going on.  (Sometimes they made it harder, so I'd be in a tizzy regarding immediate things, but I'd still have the reservoir of build up other things to eventually fall back on.)

That being said, I need to respond more specifically to each of these words in this sentence.  I don't think I was ever utilitarian in the sense of wanting to use the mission.  My intention was to work for 2 years as a secretary with them (and work on the side with Austrians) and hope that another opportunity would open up to extend my work with them in another position using my skills better beyond the 2 years.  That was my intention when I accepted their offer of the position and I was always upfront.  While I was in North America my communication was with the North America office of my sending mission and that's how it was supposed to be.  Maybe if I was already with the Vienna mission and between 2-year terms home on furlough that would be different and I might communicate directly with the Vienna mission then, but not before I got there in the first place.

As far as being calculative is concerned, I'm not a calculative type of person.  To me that smacks of being manipulative, and I'm not that way.  

The last one, self-oriented, might have become true as I became more and more pushed into a self-preservation position.  Towards the end when they made it so hard to figure out what was going on and when people weren't responding when they needed to be and I was being shunned, it was all taking a toll.  So who wouldn't become self-oriented in such situations?  Nevertheless I wasn't even then completely self-oriented, because I still taught Sunday school at the English speaking church, for example.   

The rest of the time I was with the mission I think you'd have a hard time saying I was really self-oriented.  Just because I didn't blab what I was thinking doesn't mean I was self-oriented.  Or just because I disagreed with the mission doesn't mean I was self-oriented either.  

***

There's more discussion of this figure, the Fishbein model, but the next section is going to be more than I want to do right now, so I'll have to save it for the next post.

375. Commitment, Pt. 17 (Penley & Gould, pt. 1)

This next article is:

Penley, Larry E. & Gould, Sam. (1988). Etzioni's model of organizational involvement: a perspective for understanding commitment to organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior. 9(43), 43-59.

***

I'm skipping several pages to the section "Dimensions of commitment" which deals with 3 types of commitment from Etzioni's model.

"Moral Commitment
...A moral commitment is characterized by the acceptance of and identification with organizational goals.  It may be thought of as a kind of organizational identification..." (p. 46)

I came to Vienna with what I thought was a pretty strong moral commitment to the mission, but that became eroded away during the time I was there.  First it became eroded because I just wasn't so sure how trustworthy they were, but at the very end their very goals came into question I think as I began to question more and more who they really were.

***

"Calculative Commitment
... It is a commitment to an organization which is based on the employee's receiving inducements to match contributions." (p. 46)

It's possible that the times when my commitment increased due to my having work more interesting to me, even when the basic issues remained the same, could have been commitment of this nature, because really the whole thing was not most fundamentally about my work, so that was a diversion or something.  It did not address my complaints at all, but it might have been a nice inducement, it's true.

***

"Alienative Commitment
... Etzioni (1961) originally described alienative involvement as typical of a prison or military basic training camp in which a coercive compliance system is prevalent.  For many readers, it is difficult to conceive of alienation as a basis for organizational commitment.  Yet, it can be viewed as such if one thinks of an employee's attachment to an organization as a consequence of (1) a lack of control over the internal organization environment and (2) the perceived absence of alternatives for organizational commitment.


Essential to understanding of the concept is Etzioni's use of the word -- alienation, Etzioni borrowed from the work of Karl Marx who gave alienation its classic definition -- a lack of control... To the alienatively committed worker, rewards and punishments may seem random rather than a direct result of the quality or the quantity of work.  The employee's perceived sense of randomness provides the sense of loss of control.  Thus the negative affective attachment to the organization, ascribed by Etzioni to the alienatively involved employee, develops." (p. 47)

 The first few months in Vienna, before being sent back to the USA I definitely faced this kind of thing.  It was strange to me and I didn't see any need for it; it didn't make any sense to me.  Even when I understood why they probably did it I still didn't think it was necessary and I disagreed with it.

As far as lack of control was concerned, I had the distinct belief that someone else had access to my computer, such as via a network or something because my computer was constantly acting strangely, and I had had experience with computers, none of which had ever acted in such a manner before.  So I felt frustrated and not in control of that, and I was supposed to be learning the software.  I didn't want to complain about it because I felt like it might be some kind of test and I thought it was stupid so in my usual way I decided to play along, but doing this was very stressful and these things took their toll, because if it wasn't one thing it was another and not to complain of any of them was difficult ... was stressful.  I'm not sure they (the management) liked it that I didn't complain, either, because maybe I was supposed to complain.

For me the randomness was my job placement.  And no one else was moved around so much either!  (And how many times have I said that here?!)  I wasn't looking for reward or punishment, although just encouragement or correction if I were off-base, I guess, would have been enough.  No one ever said there was a problem with my work or anything though.

 ***

"... However, the alienatively committed employee remains despite a perceived deficit in rewards for efforts...


The alienatively committed employee's inaction may be due to fear's of serious financial loss from leaving (e.g., loss of pension), not perceived alternative jobs, or the loss of family ties with geographical mobility.  In the typical work organization, then, alienative commitment may be conceived to represent the kind of organizational attachment which results when an employee no longer perceives that there are rewards commensurate with investments; yet, he or she remains due to environmental pressure.  Thus alienative commitment is a negative organizational attachment which is characterized by low internsity of intentions to meet organizational membership." (p. 48)

When it comes down to it, the main reasons I stayed on when it became clear that the mission and I were not a good fit were 1) I couldn't quite get myself to fully believe that they were as bad as they seemed to be; 2) duty said that I should complete my 2 year commission (personal value, commitment to supporters, etc.); 3) I didn't know what my other options were if I left

That number 3 there is pretty similar to what the authors are talking about.

***

That's all I want to take from that article.

My migraine is kind of bad today.  I've got to try to find a recipe I said I'd make for Sunday that I can't find now.  Maybe I misfiled it.  Otherwise I'll make a different salad, I guess.

374. Commitment, Pt. 16 (Angle & Perry, pt. 1)

This next article is:

Angle, Harold L., & Perry, James L. (1981, March). An empirical assessment of organizational commitment and organizational effectiveness. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(1), 1-13.

In the literature review, under a section titled "Organizational Commitment and Organizational Effectiveness," we find the following quote:

"Although general organizational theory holds that the structural features of an organization should fit the demands of an environment and technology..., organizational design, alone, will not ensure organizational effectiveness.  Even where the structural prerequisites have been met, there remains a cruicial requirement -- that the members of the organization behave in a manner supportive of organizational goals."

I certainly agree with this and even agree wholeheartedly, even as pertains to the Vienna mission.  But the thing is that I thought that I was doing everything to meet organizational goals and I thought they decidedly were not acting in a way that would point toward those stated goals.  So that, as you can imagine, was very confusing to me. 

I was already dedicated, I already understood the perils of the communists (at least I thought I was pretty sure I did, even experientially, as well as having read some first hand accounts of believers at a research center).  The fact that they so mistrusted me was insulting and they should have told me that upfront, maybe before I even got there. 

Well, the thing was that I agreed with their goals and I was committed to them about as much as anyone could be, but I was told I would be a secretary and I wasn't so committed to that part of it, except to do my best and make a positive contribution to the mission. 

But the way the mission treated me at the beginning - which is the fountainhead of when everything else began, so is the most important time, I think - was like it was testing me.  And the reason you test someone is because you don't really trust them.  If you trusted him/her you wouldn't have to test him/her.  So the mission didn't think, evidently, that I had commitment.

Well, the thing was that when they tested me, they were testing me for something other then the goals that are publicly known, so they have other things than the publicly known goals.  Are these other things "goals"?  I'm not sure, because I never really became an insider to find that out.  But they definitely were values and norms.

***

The study itself is not too applicable to my situation, but the discussion makes a broad statement that is interesting:

"This pattern suggests that any impact of employee commitment on the organization may indeed depend on the specific kinds of behaviors to which the employees are committed and, of course, the effects of such behaviors on organizational outcomes." (p. 10)

So, for example, allowing me opportunities to actually teach was something that would have motivated me more than being a secretary.  Or if there are different tasks of a job that one prefers or dislikes, that kind of thing.  For me, there wasn't particularly anything that I disliked about being a secretary, it's just that it's not where my heart lay and that's not what I wanted to do.  Not to mention it wasn't challenging to me. 

I still have to figure out the reasoning of some of the things.  They did start to let me take trips, but then it all fell apart after my parents left and dad attributed it to my being too independent.  If so this is what might have happened.

Before I left Seattle for Vienna in 1987 Dad told me I might have to have a debriefing from his work, but that didn't happen for some reason unbeknownst to me.  But maybe they (the security gurus, military security, CIA, whoever) decided that I could go but only on a short leash.  But my sending mission didn't know that (they were a British mission, so maybe they were out of the loop) when they said they didn't think there should be any problem with me working with Austrians since I'd mostly be working in Austria as a secretary (i.e., not making trips to East Europe).  So I arrive in Vienna and they have orders that I am to be on a short leash and they fight against me with all their strength to get me to be reigned in.  Probably only the leadership knew about what was going on, but my boss was the assistant director, so I was working among the leadership, so they could make it difficult for me using just the leadership.

But that went (and goes - current) against everything I believe in.  My values and my approach to ministry.  If that is what happened, my response remains the same except my view of my father is that much horrified, because he knew all along.  He must have if his saying that I was "too independent" is accurate, then that means he knew all along.  But I need to work that out some more too.  So that's not my final theory. 

***

That's the end of this article.

373. Commitment, Pt. 15 (DeCotiis & Summers, pt. 3)

There is a short section of this text titled "Consequences" in which the apparently at that time (1987) few extant studies had as of yet looked at commitment from an "independent variable" standpoint.  So whereas we were before talking more about what things might lead to commitment (or put a damper on it), her we are talking about what happens at various levels of commitment, where commitment is the one acting on things, not being acted upon.

After all that there is just one little phrase I want to quote in this section:

"[C]ommitment may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the job performance." (p. 453)

I was living proof of that, really, when you think of it.  I was committed to the goal as I knew it when I first arrive, as supporters back home knew it.  I was hugely committed to East European ministry and I would later prove it by figuring out a way to go to the USSR on my own, because I'd lost all faith in missions, but I was committed to the goal. 

But that, you know, was most definitely NOT what the mission wanted.  It was a total institution.  Other missions, if they read this could possibly nod and shake this off saying most missions end out being like that just because they're overseas and the members sort of bond together.  But whether or not that is true, and on a certain level I'm sure that is true, but I'm 100% sure they'd never seen the likes of the Vienna mission and the Vienna mission would have been most vehemently outraged at my audacity to say or think such a thing.  And they just might have been motivated to knock me down a notch or two, maybe by even sending me to the USA for counseling, for example.

***

The next brief quote comes from the section titled "A Model".

"Our interpretation of the literature suggests that commitment to an organization has as its primary source the intra-organizational experiences of the individual." (p. 453)

This doesn't say what kinds of experiences, when the experiences take place, who might be involved, etc.  For me, the fact that I had such unexpected experiences early on that ran counter to not only what I expected but also to what I valued and believed in, even very deeply, and that some of these things were downright shocking to me just could not be overcome by any other actions the mission might make later on, clinched the deal. 

So whereas everything that led up to the 5th month maybe (?) could have been undone, the event of the 5th month wherein they sent me back to the USA declaring I had culture shock, when in fact it was stress from the mission that they had intentionally created and set up, and I was no where near needing the kind of help they suggested, but the shock of what they did put me over the top so that then I did have a lot of anxiety that they caused.  I never talked about the mission though in counseling because I somehow knew that would be the death of me (figuratively speaking).  So I dredged up various other stressors while I tried to build up the courage to deal with the mission again.  I had to learn how to deal with them and use this opportunity.  So I did.  I learned to master hiding my true thoughts and feelings.  If I could fool professionals I could fool missionaries, and I did. 

Saying it like that does make it sound ironically like I was falling into the very trap that I disdained in the mission: disception.  And I guess it was.  This is a case where Romans 2:1 seems to bear out:

2 Therefore you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. 

Well, you wouldn't believe me if I made myself to be all lily white, now, would you?  That was my survival tactic and I was backed against a corner, in shock and I didn't really think it through like this.  It was just something I did.  There was too much going on to sort it through that clearly yet; I was still in shock.  I think I was in shock at least for months after that.  So I was thinking - a lot! - but there was too much going on, so it was piecemeal and not very put together.  


So getting back to the text... my intra-organizational experiences the first quarter of my time with the mission were in the gutter and they blew it for any hope of commitment to the mission.  If the mission thought that sending me back to the USA would resolve my independent streak (e.g., my desire to work with Austrians, which I had upfront spoken with my sending mission about before arriving in Vienna), they very clearly did not know me and underestimated my resolve to do church work in Slavic countries, they underestimated my commitment to my value system, they underestimated my knowledge base.  So basically, the all around underestimated me.  When I lived in Maryland and used the University of Maryland library I used to get a kick out of their banners that read "Fear the Turtle" (their mascot).  It's so counterintuitive to fear a turtle;  who'se afraid of a turtle?  So that's me, a little turtle needing a banner that says "Fear the Turtle".  (Sorry, Maryland, I'm sure you are very fearsome and your turtle is quite the exception as far as turtles go.)

***

That's all for now because I was interrupted while writing this so my day has gone farther than I'd like.  I'll send another later, Lord willing.

372. Commitment, Pt. 14 (DeCotiis & Sommers, pt. 2)

This next major section of text I'll discuss is: "Antecedents of Commitment."

"Commitment, for example, has been shown to be positively related to age..., tenure...,  acceptance of the Protestant Work Ethic...,  central life interest in work..., ambition; upward mobility, ..., and having a high need for achievement.  Interestingly, of the personal characteristics studied to date, only education level has been found to be negatively related to commitment." (p. 449; The illipses ("..." above) replace all the references for relevant studies.)

All things considered, this would seem to point to me having a very strong commitment to the Vienna mission.  As to education, I was actually one of the least educated, since the mission consisted mainly of seminarians and hence most had a master's degree at least, and I just had a graduate certificate at that point.  But the thing was that the organization's very goal or purpose was such that it needed highly educated people (although some in church work don't think education is as important as others do).  So if someone had a seminary degree and needed a place to work, the Vienna mission is just the kind of place they might consider working, so I don't think that the Vienna mission really fits the bill for for the "negatively related to commitment" statement. 

Now, if someone had an advance degree in physics or something that might be another matter, then their commitment might very well be subject to this statement.   I'm not saying that it would have to have been though, but just that it would have been more likely (in keeping with this text), I think, than for the seminarian.  Even me, when you think of it, that my B.A. was in European Studies, with a minor in Russian Studies, then I got a certificate from the Goethe Institut in Grundstufe II (not very impressive, really) German, so I came with that background applied to the mission.

***

"Salancik (1977a) suggested that role conflict leads to the perception of decreased responsibility, and that anything which decreases perceived responsibility also decreases role involvement and thereby commitment. Similarly, role ambiguity, as a source of role confusion, may decrease commitment by reducing or clouding the perceived linkage between the member's role and the attainment of organizational goals." (p. 451)

 Not only did I have this text underlined, a bar next to the right margin of the text, a star next to the text, but also an exclamation mark by the text.  Wow!  I think I can see why I did that.

Early on there were conflict not just in my role(s) but in what I was being told, and what I was doing.  I expected to be doing regular secretarial work, not stuff like reading software manuals.  So there were lots of role conflicts throughout my tenure.  Conflicts in how I viewed myself and what I was doing, conflicts in what I thought the mission wanted me to do and what I thought I was supposed to be doing, etc. 

And certainly these conflicts they made me step back, because I didn't trust the mission so much and I was watching to try to figure out what was going on.  It didn't take too long to figure out I couldn't really trust anyone, so I figured I had to just figure things out on my own, and at different times I'd learne different things through various means to help me figure out what was going on to know what I was supposed to do and how to act and all. 

I guess the "decreases role involvement and thereby commitment" would fit me to a certain degree.  I did my job, so I didn't skimp on that.  I never didn't do my job or slacked off on that or anything, but the same way I didn't complain about anything I also didn't jump to really offer to do anything great either.  If they came up to me, fine.  Otherwise, no,  I'd just sit and mind my own business.  Maybe that's how they wanted it anyway.  But they really hated it that I was so involved in Austrian things right off the bat, I think because they couldn't socialize me or something, except it was the military chaplain/H.R. director that stepped in, so maybe it was the U.S. government that didn't like me out of control ount on my own, for all I know.  Dad said in his line of work they didn't like independent people.  So maybe that was it.   So much for being from the land of the FREE and the brave.

Eventually my role ambiguity became just atrocious; it was awful.  Now I think I can tolerate a fair amount of ambiguity, but this was awful and it was intentional and I could hardly tell which way was up.  That was really horrible.  That was when there were a lot of rumors going around and it seemed like there was constantly someone around me with some new rumor about something or another and the thing is that there would be some truth and some probably-not-so-truth.  There were things about who was going to take over as my old boss' secretary (or before that whether I would stay or another gal that my boss' wife liked better), the possibility of helping open an office in Moscow, etc.  It felt like they were trying to feed me things to confuse me so that I wouldn't know what was really truth there, like, basically, disinformation.  So maybe they really were a spy organization after all.  Hmm?  This was all towards the end of my time with the mission.

***

"Etzioni (1975) pointed out that members of utilitarian organizations are less committed than are members of organizations of organizations which are more normative in nature.  No [sic] surprisingly, in an earlier study (Mintzer, 1968), it was found that members of coercive organizations are the least committed, those of utilitarian are most committed, and members or normative organizations are the most committed in their respective organizations." (p. 451)

To me the Vienna mission was a coercive organization, and, true to form, I was, as would be expected, among the least expected.  Maybe if they'd have tried a little love instead of coercion... All they did was drive me away from the mission.  You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, right?  At least it's worth a try.

To everyone else in the mission I think they would say the mission was normative in nature.  The end product of socialization is internalization of the mission's norms and values as a package, not piecemeal, which would not be acceptable.  It had to be an all or nothing package.  So you had to be able to take the plunge and do the whole thing, even without knowing everything, because once you were in it you were stuck, you were in it. 

I never took the plunge, because I couldn't do it because they turned me off the first few months I was with the mission, when they treated me with coercion, or with what felt a lot like coercion to me.  I was so humiliated for 2 years; it was like I was a no one.  My voice counted for nothing.  I was just pushed around like dirt and treated like sh*t.  No one else had so many positions I did.  So it had a personal side like that, and it really did, but the toll it took on me built up over time, while the moral horror struck me quickly when I saw the early discrepancies.

***

"[I]t could be argued that while goal acceptance is not prerequisite to membership in utilitarian or coercive organizations, it is prerequisite for membership in normative organizations where membership is not only its own reward, it may be the only reward." (p. 451)

While the Vienna mission treated me as if it were a coercive organization, if it truly were, that would mean that it wouldn't be necessary for me to accept its goal(s), at least according to this text.  The way the mission was going at me it's possible that that could be the case.  If it truly were treating me as a coercive organization, it could be doing so under the influence of the U.S. government (because of my dad, who worked at Boeing as a manager in SDI).  In this case, they might be just trying to get me out of there or some such thing and they wouldn't really care whether I agreed with the mission goals. 

The mission itself was normative, however, and sure enough accepting the mission's goals was indeed prerequisite for joining the mission.  In the case of the Vienna mission, I think there were other intangible rewards, mainly the type of thing related to effects of the courses on students and the like.

 ***

"Bateman and Strasser (1984) found a strong association between leader reward behavior and commitment. Supportive of this contention, positive supervisor-subordinate interactions have been found to be associated with increased commitment on the part of subordinates by Lee (1971). More generally, it has been found that the more social involvement an individual has with other numbers of an organization, the higher the individual's commitment to the organization... In addition to these extra-task sources of commitment, the felt challenge and responsibility offered by the task itself was reported to have a positive effect on commitment." (p. 451)

I've written already a bit about my interactions with my boss.  Both he and his boss were encouraging enough as was my mentor (my boss's boss's secretary).  So as far as "positive supervisor-subordinate interactions" go I guess they were okay, but not great.  The thing was that my boss said upfront that he'd never had a secretary before, which is no great sin or anthing, but he wasn't too good of a supervisor.  I guess as long as all they wanted of me was to read the software manuals (!?) then I guess it didn't matter too much though, because how much supervision can one need for that?  So I was on independent study for that. 

However, I think I did very well as far as social involvement was concerned.  The mission leaders really didn't like it that I had so much involvement with Austrians, though.  So no matter how much involvement I had with them, it didn't matter, it had to be exclusive involvement with them.  This flies directly contrary to what my sending mission had told me.  They had said they didn't think it should be a problem if I was involved with Austrians in my off hours.  So I'm thinking more and more that this might be my dad's involvement... that I was "too independent" in getting involved with the Austrians.

I can see how the "extra-task sources of commitment" augment commitment and how it did so at the Vienna mission, because the mission trips would have been this kind of thing, but even the wives at home with the children whle the husbands travel would have bound the families together through these shared experiences.  So I think that really fit the mission.

***

"It may be that climate perceptions affect an individual's perceptions of the congruence between organizational goals and his or her own goals and, hence, his or her role involvement.  If, for example, an organization creates and maintains a working environment geared toward the attaiment of certain organizational goals and if the individual's preference for a particular environment and goal set is consistent with the environment, we would expect the individual's commitment to the organization to be high." (p. 452)

The climate in the Vienna mission, might be described as family-like, security-conscious (!), hierarchical (but approachable), strong informal communication structure, casual, etc.

Okay, so we'll start with that.  Being family-like is okay, as long as it doesn't go overboard.  The thing is that I like to have my own life too.  I don't want to be stifled by the family... or the overly zealous security consciousness.  At least that's how I saw it.  As far as I was concerned, they might as well have been building another tower of Babel trying to reach heaven, that's now much they distrusted God and went off on their own sinning with deception for security.  Do you think that deception pleases God?  So instead of building a tower they build this mental fortress, based on their security policies that are based too much on deception.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not against security, but I think caution without deception is a more biblical way.  I know that's not the way the world would do it, but we're Christians representing Christ working for a Christian cause. 

Anyway, on to hierarchical.  The mission didn't have a lot of layers or levels in its hierarchy, but anyone who was in a position of authority was to be respected.  Period.  They were approachable, but they were to be respected.  That being said, the leadership was not above getting in and helping out with some of the most nitty gritty things as needed, they were basically not "above" anything.  And when you go on trips, those, although I didn't go on many, I think those are equalizers so that when you are on them, especially on the road situations can come up and you never know, the normally lower in position person could shine.  The leadership was always good about recognizing others who had accomplished something.

Still, even with all that it was hierarchical and you couldn't get around it and the power differential was real and the buck stopped there, and you knew it, even if you had some power, even if it was some power that was different from  your boss' power.  That's the kind of brick wall that I faced when before I left I decided that I wasn't going to approach them to continue on; they'd have to approach me.  But they didn't approach me.  That's the brick wall.   You can't negotiate with it.  They're boss, period.  You have to accept it or not.  So I took the Not option.  I guess you can hardly blame me either and it wold have been stupid of me to do otherwise. 

As to the strong informal communication structure at the mission, I'm really not crazy about that, but that's now.  Back then I didn't really know any better, I don't think. My first boss here where I live now was like that.  I was flown down here for a day of interviews and whatnot and in a group interview I asked her what is her approach to departmental communications.  She said she didn't have one that she didn't think it was important and she just communicated as she thought it was needed.  A red flag immediately went up and that was the one things that I really hesitated about, but I came down here anyway, and sure enough she was an information manipulator.  And that's the thing, when you get into the world of "informal" you open things up to manipulation and the likes.  Who likes that?  Not me, that's for sure.

 In Vienna it was a bit different because I don't think individuals would have gotten away with that long just for their own sakes, being manipulative, but I could be wrong on this (maybe they would have gotten by for a while).  But the thing is that if the mission leaders had certain objectives in mind that maybe they didn't want to reveal (at least at that time) they could use manipulation but not for individual purposes, that would be for organizational purposes.  So that's more what I think would have happened. 

Anyway, the informal communication structure was very strong in Vienna.  I've discussed it elsewhere in more detail (maybe look up the "communication" keyword), so I won't try to duplicate that here.  It was complex though.  There were impromptu meetings, chance meetings in the halls, exchanges of information in social settings, etc.  So I suppose if you wanted to make a name for yourself quickly you'd try to learn the ropes of the informal communication structure and make as much use of it as possible.  I'm not very good at viewing people instrumentally, though, which it seems that is what it would take to do that.

The last descriptor is casual, and that's fine with me.  The mission could be formal when it was called for, which wasn't very often, though.  I liked the level of casualness.  I'm trying to remember, but I think we could even where jeans if we weren't going to meet anyone from outside the office that day, otherwise we'd wear business casual for just usual days to the office.  

***

That's it for this post.  There's more in this article though.

371. Commitment, Pt. 13 (DeCotiis & Summers, pt. 1)

Sometimes I wish I could just pump out like 10 of these a day I have so much to go over and to say, but I just can't.  It's not just a matter of time, but my health restrictions too.  Like now my lower back hurts and my migraine (which actually doesn't hurt so much as put me in a mental fog - and sometimes make reading difficult and affect my balance) is noticeably present.  So that slows me down.  I had 2 medical tests today, 1 doctors appointment and physical therapy, and I've been tired all day and I'm still tired.  So here's my best shot... (I never have been one to give up easily, once I set my mind to something).

***

This next paper is:

DeCotiis, Thomas A. & Summers, Timothy P. (1987). A path analysis of a model of the antecedents and consequences of organizational commitment. Human Relations. 40(7), 445-470.

***

The first major section of the article is: "Rethinking the Definition of Organizational Commitment" and within that section there are various issues, usually a paragraph or two long.  The first issue I'm going to address is "Attitudinal Commitment."

"Buchanan (1974a) presented a definition of organizational commitment that appears to be the basis of many of the attitudinal definitions found in the literature.  He defines organizational commitment as an individual's '... partisan affective attachment to the goals and values of an organization, to [his or her] role in relation to these goals and values and to the organization for its own sake, apart from its purely instrumental work [to the individual]" (p. 533).'" (p.446)

This is probably going to go in a direction that you might not expect if you've been reading any of these posts at all.  There was never any complaint about my attitude while with the Vienna mission and I was always pleasant and agreeable and never complained.  I did as I was told, maybe to a fault even.  I was sociable and took initiative, which seems like a good sign of affective commitment too.  So there shouldn't be any problem right?  Wrong.

When I was sent to the USA for "culture shock" counseling my "take away" from that was to hide my true thoughts and feelings from others.  I think I was even afraid to leave counseling until I could master that because I was scared to death of the mission after that.  So, in truth I had zilch affective commitment, which is why I could leave and never look back.

I was shocked that they really and truly were going to send me back to the USA and my affective commitment zeroed out I think when I took all my things from my office and brought them to my apartment to stay for the duration of the time I'd be gone.  I lived about half a mile from the office and I did this all on foot, including a lot of books I'd brought over and each trip was like nailing the coffin of my affective commitment until it was just dead.

It hardly had a time to come to life, actually, when you think of it.  I mean I arrived in Vienna and right away I faced these lies and sitting hours on end with software manuals when I could have learned that beforehand in a class.  And then there was the issue about not being allowed to study German which was promised in the policy handbook to new comers because I was "too busy" (studying policy manuals!).

So on the one hand I was a model of Pollyana where I was social and kind and all.  Actually, though, you might as well make the best of a bad situation, so it's not that I wouldn't have done any of that.  But that wasn't an indication of affective commitment in my case.

***

This issue is "The Membership and Willingness Issues."

"...Weiner (1982) has distinguished between organizational and instrumental motivation in that he defines commitment as '... the totality of interalized normative pressures to act in a way that meets organizatal goals and interests' (p. 421)" (p. 447)

If I may take the "organizational goals and interests" to be what the mission ostensibly says they are I think I felt it my duty and responsibility to do the best I could to do my job in such a way as to further the mission.  I also think that some of the social things I initiated benefited the organization.

But that being said, you understand, that I also entertained outside the mission, as well, such as my neighbor and landlady, singles from my sending mission, etc. So I'm not sure that the mission would really have been so keen about that.  They would have liked more single-focused attention, I think.  Therefore, maybe the entertaining shouldn't be counted here.

So then if all you have lef is me doing my job well, that probably wasn't adequate for the mission, especially if I was rebellious in their eyes.  To me it was that they hadn't done anything to earn my trust and I didn't think I was doing anything wrong.  I wasn't harming them in any way.

***

"The Revised Concept"

"In view of the above discussion, the view of the present authors is that commitment to an organization is a two-dimensional construct centered on organizational goal and value internalization, and role involvement in terms of these goals and values.  Hence, organizational commitments can be defined as 'the extent to which an individual accepts and internalizes the goals and values of an organization and views his or her organizational role in terms of its contribution to those goals and values, apart from any personal instrumentalities that may attend his or her contribution." (p. 448)

So we already know that I really didn't internalize the mission's norms and values, not the ones I found once I arrived in Vienna.  The goals, as expressed publicly were what drew me there in the first place and I accepted them wholeheartedly, but some of the other things there ended out taking precedence and crowding out the goals.

I don't like the way that this is worded, at least for my particular situation, because it was not my "personal instrumentalities" that got in the way, although the secretary issue would probably have been along those lines, but I said in advance that I wanted to work with Austrians in the evenings, so I thought that was all okay and agreed upon.  They wanted to absolutely shove me into the secretarial mold and I wouldn't have accepted that if I'd known in advance.

The issue here though is the use of deception, and right from the beginning with me, not just with border guards or what have you, but with me.  So those kinds of things with the values and what they thought they had to do that I disagreed with, based on things I had studied and been with different missionaries as well as a bit of experience myself in Eastern Europe.  So I couldn't accept their values, and I'm talking what I think are some fairly major values for what are fundamental bases for their work.

So it's quite a dilemma when you agree with the goal but not the values.  What do you do?  I guess this may be the first time I remember thinking of it quite like this.  Maybe I did at some point, but I don't remember.  But actually, it really is the old Ends-Justifies-The-Means philosophy, which I've talked about more than once here, right? Unfortunately, I'm not a pragmatist, so that doesn't go over too well with me.

The thing is that the whole time with the Vienna mission I was in a supporting role, although I went on one teaching trip and a few day-long ESL trips.  I could do my work according to my values, but I was in actuality supporting they mission with it's values operate in its pragmatist fashion.  That is pretty much what I did for 2 years.  I had figured out the ends-justtifies-the-means philosophy while I was there so I knew  while I was still there that that was how they were operating.

Okay, so bear with me here.  To backtrack above I had trouble with the goals & values because of the values, that there was a discrepancy, in my mind between the goals and the values of the mission, which I interpreted as the Ends-Justifies-The-Means (Pragmatism, among other names).  For further explanation of this look for the pragmatism keyword and follow the discussions in the other posts where I discuss it more in detail.

What threw me off from the mission were actions that indicated a difference in values, particularly.  Some of the things, especially having the two military chaplain on staff made me wonder about other connections since I did know that one mission had received money from the CIA (and I did a Freedom of Information Act request on it), so that would have been a separation of church and state concern as well if anything there was going on as well.  And if anything was going on there then the question would have been raised as to whether there were any other "goals" besides the obviously stated ones.  For example, "keep Margo under control/out of East Europe/etc." (because of my dad working in management in SDI at the time) would have been another goal, if a fleeting one.  In such a case, I might have also had a problem with a goal as well as with values.

 I think that there are security mandates that probably also come close to these, even if they only come from mission leadership, but, for example, they managed to have everyone shun me pretty well the weeks before I left the mission for good.  Even my boss's kids ignored me!  So that's in there too somewhere as part of a goal too, right?  I don't know where it is, but it's somewhere, and it's real.

And my commitment to it... Can I claim the 5th Amendment*?  Or is it too late for that?

*In the USA the 5th Amendment of the Constitution grants the right to remain silent rather than  testify against yourself in a court of law

***

That's all for now, but I'll get another one in later, Lord willing.

I'd just like to say, and this has been on my mind to say this.  All these articles that I collected, you whould remember the context.  I collected these articles during the time when I was living in Russia - on an extended visit to the USA.  I was so SICK AND TIRED of all the problems and political issues in my life that constantly kept pointing back to my dad and I couldn't have a life of my dad and I was in my 2nd career and had my 2nd major health catastrophe, one in the USA and one in Russia and I had had it.  I wrote a human rights report and I've quoted parts of it here and then the other thing was I had to try to understand my life and the worst time was with the Vienna mission.  I didn't research like this any other time, just that time because I had to understand it and a few people believed me but my family didn't, except my Grandmother, she did.  So I am studying the Vienna mission from the standpoint of it being part of a political USA-USSR/Russia mess that is my life.  But to understand the Vienna mission I have to look at the mundane parts, but that's why I went to Minneapolis and did this research full-time every day for a month.  And I've done I don't know maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of the articles so far.  We've got a ways to go.  So sit back and enjoy the ride.  There's other stuff along the way too.

370. Commitment, Pt. 12 (Caldwell, et al, pt. 1)

I got some housework done today and also found some of the materials I'll be using for this blog - since I still am getting situated a bit from the move.  There are still some things that I just sort of stashed to get out of the way, but I still need to maybe organize them maybe or find more permanent homes or the like. 

Anyway, the next article is:

Caldwell, David F., Chatman, Jennifer A., & O'Reilly, Charles A. (1990). Building organizational commitment: a multifirm study. Journal of Occupational Psychology. 63(3), 245-261. 

***

"Taken together, studies have revealed few consistent findings... However, one clear implication is that early experiences in an individual's employment may have a large impact on the subsequent development of commitment." (p. 246)

You will note that I didn't write this, and I had nothing to do with the this being written.  I did not even know these authors; they were at California universities when I was in Seattle.  However, I sure wish they had written that much earlier and that the leadership of the Vienna mission had read it and taken not of this particular sentence, because little did they know that this could have been the one main thing that resulted in me not having commitment. 

They might have been set on some strange form of socialization, but if they wanted commitment from me they went about the wrong way of getting it.  In fact, they went about the exact correct way of losing it.  Congratulations to them on doing such a great job!  Bravo! 

***

"In fact, Feldman (1977) argues that the most effective types of realistic job previews are those which, in addition to giving balanced descriptions about the work itself, provide potential entrants with information about advance opportunities and the general work climate within the organization." (p. 246)

How I understand it, they used the excuse of there being layers of organizations needing to approve me (my mission, East Europe office, the Vienna mission, to whom I was on loan - which is how most everyone else at the Vienna mission also was there) to explain how there was a "misunderstanding" about my not having a roommate, wanting to work with Austrians in the after hours, etc.  But I think they really liked that set up so they could keep their distance.

They really didn't particularly want, it seems, missionaries to know much of anything extra before they arrived.  Everything was supposed to be decided by the mission, including roommates, where you go to church, etc.  So for me to state in advance that these are my plans was probably out of line in their thinking.  And when I offered to take the software class to learn the  word processor software program before arriving, they wouldn't even tell me that! 

So much for "realistic job previews." 

***

"[O]rganizations whose recruitment practices clarify the organizations' values for potential employees are more likely to select for and enhance internalized attachment among new recruits than are organizations who do not screen applicants for value congruence.  This is because if values are clear and salient, candidates will have more information on which to determine if they agree with or can comfortably conform to those values, and organizations can more easily match prospective candidates both to the specific job and the organization culture (Chatman, 1989, O'Reilly, Chatman & Caldwell, 1989)" (p. 248)

I'm not sure how many other new recruits were aware of the level of deception the mission used - that it was basically a lifestyle - before they arrived in Vienna.  Or even that the mission was such a total institution.  But the thing was that most new people probably would be in a position coming that they would feel totally dependent there anyway, so they would be glad to  just let the mission take control and they wouldn't miss anything; it'd be fine with them, because there would be no reason for them not to be okay with that.    Even so, however, there could be some that might not be so comfortable in general, having to sort of sell their soul to the mission.  I've dealt with that in the socialization file discussions a lot, but that's what you'd be dealing with here.

Of course, everyone came to the mission with congruent theology, that's a given and everything's open about that stuff.  So that's all above board.  But actually ethics is theology too, and that's not all open, and I've said a million times here regarding the deception for security, which I thought was overboard.  These guys can't be trusted because they live lives of deceptions, I know because I lived with them for 2 years. If you're going to do Christian work you have to work by Christian principles.  You don't know that in advance, and you know they're not going to tell you.  They don't want the believers back home to know this, especially their supporters, so they're not going to let potential missionaries know either.  And part of being socialized is that they have this warped way of thinking and manipulating Scripture that sort of justifies it so that somehow it turns out that you're not being deceptive after all.  Sort of a houdini act or something.  But it seems to work and you have all these theologians buying into it and they do it, so it must work for them.  But it didn't work for me.

***

"Hypothesis 1:  Recruitment processes which provide individuals with a realistic sense of what is expected, and which provide opportunities for individuals to choose not to join should be related to higher levels of commitment based on internalization and identification, but not compliance." (p. 248)

It would have been very interesting if I had been at candidate's course and maybe at the meeting with the North American board, or maybe a meeting with one or two of them separately I would have been told candidly any of the following:

1) We don't want you because of your dad's work.
2) You should know that we expect your cohort to be the other secretaries there, so that's who you'll be spending a good chunk of your time with
3) The mission wants you to have a roommate so that they can more easily socialize you
4) The mission requires its workers to live a lifestyle of deception
5) If you have any grievances with the mission there really is no one to complain to (not really; not when it comes down to it).
etc.

Since my 2 years with the mission had 0 (read: zero) similarity to what I thought it would be before heading over to Vienna, I would say that absolutely and most emphatically did not have a realistic "sense of what is expected..." 

***

That's all I'm going to take from that article.  So we'll look at another one next time.