460. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 10 (Greenberg, pt. 3)

Continuing with the same article...

Referent congnitions theory... Specifically, RCT theorizes that, "In a situation involving outcomes allocated by a decision maker, resentment is maximized when people believe they would have obtained better outcomes if the decision maker had used other procedures that should have been implemented." (Cropandzano & Folger, 1989: 293-294). (p. 410)

The thing about the Vienna mission situation was that you didn't have a referent point to compare against as to what was the "other procedures that should have been implemented."  Well, that is, there were no local concrete and very specifically stated procedures.  So then you're left with idealized procedures, the kinds that you might learn in business school, the kinds you might find in textbooks, or the kind that you might find on professional organization web sites and in professional organization ethics statements.  Can you see the idealist coming out in me?  Well, that's all we're left with, isn't it?  What other options are there? 

Don't answer that.  I don't even want to know what the other options are, because I'm afraid to know and I'm sure if there are other options the mission would come up with them just to avoid having real, valid "other procedures that should have been implemented" that were fair and just.

No, on second thought... I can't leave it at that.  Having spent 2 tortuous years with the Vienna mission I just absolutely dread the thought that they would misuse Scripture to make it a false foundation of their outcome system, but they would do just that, pulling it out of the hat on as "as needed" basis.  So the Scripture, just the right one misused with some new and strange meaning and connotation could be pulled out of the hat whenever the mission needed to get a message across to a person irregardless of the work they were doing or the quality of it, so that the missionaries' work input may bear little or no apparent (or real) outcome to the outcome.

This is an extreme case - mine - and I don't know for sure if anyone else experienced it, but I think that some people might have gotten snippets of it during rough socializations, but they got on track before it had any significant effect on their career with the mission.  But it may have been enough to let them see what I mean.   Otherwise, this was primarily uniquely my experience.

But the problem with continually saying that this was uniquely my experience is that it means that the mission is capable of doing this.  The mission is capable of acting like this.  Does this mean that the mission is showing its true colors in how it treats me?  I think yes and no.  Yes to the management, the inner beast of the thing.  I'm not sure where the decisions were made to treat me how I was treated, but whereever those decisions were made, that was the true nature of the mission.  And for everyone who just played along as in groupthink, I count them in too, because that's the true nature of the mission.  The fact that they're like that is the true nature of the mission.  No these aren't its true colors in as much as it could be considered an aberration.

Ironically, though, it comes down to this: everything was happening behind closed doors, and I didn't know anything about how my fate was being decided.  This theory deals with procedures and that is the one glaring thing that would have helped beyond words, but is exactly the thing that is unimaginable at the same time.  Before I left the USA to go to Vienna I was completely open and honest with my desires and honest, but as soon as I stepped foot in Austria they took those things I'd been honest about and (what seemed to me to be) intentionally disregarded and at the same time then did everything in my regard from then on behind closed doors.  So I didn't really have any say in any of my relations with the mission. 

All things considered, I think it's reasonable to say that, "In this situation involving outcomes allocated by a decision maker [my boss, others in the mission], my resentment was maximized when I believed that I would have obtained better outcomes if the decision maker had used other procedures that should have been implemented."

Do you see how that works?  I wasn't given a chance at all, even right from the beginning.  And  I had this stellar track record of work, studies and living in Eastern Europe and all of a sudden it all came crashing down around me by these people.  It was horrible, but at least I held on to my conscience.  So that was the one thing that remained intact through the rubble.  Well, and my intelligence.  They tried to demean me and make me lose my confidence in my intelligence and I let them believe that I had given in to them... they never really knew though.  They always, to the very end underestimated me.  That was what saved me. 

***

Notably, Tyler and Bies... have reviewed evidence supporting the existence of five criteria related to the perceived fairness of treatment in organizations; (a) adequately considering others' viewpoints, (b) suppressing personal biases, (c) consistently applying decision-making criteria, (d) providing timely feedback about decisions, and (e) adequately explaining the basis for decisions. (p. 412)

This is talking about giving adequate explanations for decisions; that's what the paragraph is discussing.  I think for those who were in the regular track with the mission they probably worked with the mission to come to decisions together.  But not always.  Because the mission always reserved the right to just make decisions and there always was a certain amount of ambiguity that we knew was a part of the work.  So some things maybe you didn't always know why or the whole story behind.

But how far does this go?  Is there a limit?  With the Vienna mission, the leadership really had a carte blanche to do whatever it wanted and nobody said peep, like how it treated me.  I don't think anyone complained, even though I think especially towards the end there must have been people who knew me the best who questioned the way I was being treated.  But I was leaving and they were staying and they couldn't risk stepping out of sync over spilled milk when it was too late anyway.

And even when I first arrive in Vienna that was my thing, that, sure, I had no qualms with a certain amount of security precautions for working in the Communist countries - working in "closed countries."  But full-blown paranoia?  Living lives of deception that any spy would envy?  I think not!  And that's why the Soviet guest at the Goodwill Games a couple years later thought my dad had trained me in something I didn't even have a clue my dad might be involved in whereas it was from the Vienna mission! 

I had come to Vienna to join a Christian mission, not a pseudo spy venture and I wanted to live more by faith and less by ends justifies the means.

This all being considered, let's consider what the Vienna mission - the decision making processes - should have looked more like according to Tyler and Bess.

The Vienna mission did consider other's viewpoints, depending on the issue.  However, the missionary's viewpoint might have been one of the last viewpoint's to be considered, in my experience.  Well, I learned that I was very expendable, but that may be because they wanted me out of there.  It may have been that other missionaries might not have felt as expendable as I felt.  If the reason I felt so expendable was that I was expendable, because of my dad, then that's a really horrible connection to my dad because that makes me feel very small and meaningless in the scope of things.  Then I can't help remember my friend Nina's words in Russia that I'm just a pawn in their game and they don't care about me, and the pawn illustration then extends to Vienna.  That would really be horrible, but it has a very good chance of being true.

Personal biases weren't an issue in the Vienna mission; that wasn't the problem, so I'm not even going to deal with that here.

As to consistently applying decision-making criteria, there were no known decision-making criteria to apply consistently, so how could they do it, unless it was unbeknownst to the masses of us?  I'm pretty sure that even those who were socialized but not in the very inner circles wouldn't even know this kind of thing.  They just didn't like to be pinned down to anything, because when it came down to it they were the final word, period.  And input for the final word could come from  all sorts of places from any of the 15 odd missions on the board when they come together and decids on things.  Then you get the students and if some powerful and enough numbers of student groups concerned enough about issues that it could result in decisions or affect decisions.

Besides consistency is anathema in this type of work anyway.  You have to keep the "enemy" guessing or on his/her toes so s/he can't figure out what's going on.  For example, it's like when they used to change the meeting place every week from house to house under Communism and they had a whole system set up of how to communicate changes or whatever.  So the mission doesn't like to consistently do much of anything, other than what they absolutely have to do, like pay taxes and bills and things like that.  And it's not like they have regular assessments of the workers, so they only have decisions on things from time to time, meaning everything is sort of ad-hoc, and so it's bound to be inconsistent as is the decision-making criteria to go with it.

So the thing was that somehow there were several decisions to move me all based on decision making criteria against which there was nothing to compare to say whether they had been consistently applied or otherwise.  Well, there was one, exception to that.  They had me take a standardized mental health test before sending me back to the US.  I don't know the result, but they'd driven me to the point of being very stressed out, but I hadn't stopped functioning or anything; I kept going.   So they applied an external criteria, but they set me up for it, as they had evidently also done with two other wives before me.  So I guess that could be considered "consistently applying decision-making criteria", that is the criteria used to decide to send someone home for counseling that would serve to shape someone up to better be able to "contend with horses."

I'm not exactly sure, however, that I would be too proud of that particular usage of "consistently applying decision-making criteria," particularly for an Evangelical Christian mission.

As to providing timely feedback about decisions, this shouldn't have really applied to me.  The thing is that I went to Vienna to serve as the  secretary of the assistant director of the Vienna mission.  I should have stayed in that position for the duration of my stay with the mission.  It is conceivable, however, that if things had gone as I conceived them before I left the U.S., that I might have discussed working with the women's ministry team.  They wanted workers with a master's of divinity degree and I only had a graduate certificate, but they also had a lot of other particulars they looked for, so I'm not sure what would have happened there.  Also, what they were doing was training the wives of pastors, which was somewhat of a cultural thing, but in a way it bothered me as if the women couldn't have a ministry on their own.  I must admit I did have a great admiration for the Baptist woman in the city I lived in in Russia - an unregistered house church that was also a Christian library.  She lived alone, although she had a daughter who was away at college most of the time I was there, and she had services at  her place.  She'd preach or she'd give place to a man to preach if there was one.  Actually I was more conservative than she was in this, but on the other hand she was more conservative than I was regarding the head dress and all.  She was a wonderful woman, really.  

In a lot of ways I miss Russia, because I had friends there that understood me and I felt fulfilled there and I could use my gifts and talents.  I guess every place is different, though.

Finally, adequately explaining the basis for decisions.  The mission always gave a reason for its decisions.  In Vienna it was generally the H.R. director to do so, and in the U.S. it was the manager there that did it, but I never believed them.  How could I?  It was like blowing smoke in my eyes.  That's all it was.  So once again, you have an example of the level of trust I had in the mission leadership and how it started even early on, because if I couldn't believe their reason for sending me back to the U.S., then you know that I'd lost all faith in them period.  I was a lost cause.

So the thing was here, they had to really think that I believed their story as to why I was being sent back to the U.S.  And if I believed their story, then they really must have have thought that I was an idiot 1st class.  I mean really, you've got to be kidding!

First of all, I did not believe I had culture shock at all - I mean culture shock pertaining to problems living in Vienna, Austria.  The moment it came out of his mouth I knew it was a lie - straight out.  I mean a plain old fashioned schoolyard lie.  I don't care what the refereed article with its pretty x-y axis charts might indicate because they didn't apply to me, because the only thing wrong with me was that the mission was too busy making everything difficult for me and causing all kinds of unexplained stress that strangely enough was peculiar to the mission and only the mission (i.e., relations outside the mission were excluded), and for some reason other people at the mission did not share the same experience of stress as me.  (Although some said they had some stress, but not like what I was experiencing, although maybe some other's socialization bore some similarity - on a lesser scale.)  So I lived in my in my own little world with its own rules which were created by the mission and I could not make heads nor tails of, maybe like Alice in Wonderland, where rules could change at ttheir every whim, which of course could drive a person very crazy.  Maybe that sounds exaggerated, but early on when I'd be alone in my office and strange things would be happening with the computer that I knew were rigged, and then it always would be that only I would see or experience it so then if I went to show anyone it wouldn't happen.   Then it would be something else.  Everyone is just saying how you just have to take your time and not rush it, as if it's a cultural thing for these strange things to be happening on the computer.  Do you see what I mean?  That's just one example.  Then eventually, of course, you don't want to say anything, so you just do your work and if there's a problem you just put up with it and don't say anything at all. Of course, then, you have to deal with the stress of the problem.  And then they tell me I have culture shock. It must have taken a lot of gall for them to tell me that, I guess.

I was just absolutely in shock, of course for one thing - well, once it finally sunk in that it's for real and they actually are going to carry it out and they are not kidding around they are going to do this thing and send me back to the US.  I felt like I was living a nightmare. - This is how the Soviets treated Christians, to retrain them, or at least try, to stop being Christians and become atheists  So what was the mission wanting me to become?

But the thing was that I had had all my books at the office, so they had seen all my books on Eastern Europe, religion in the USSR, theology, European studies, etc., etc., so they so those and they could have thought that maybe I had some level of knowledge or insight.   Just because I was quiet, though, I guess, they somehow chose to hugely underestimate me to think that I really accepted the premist that what they said on the surface was really why they were sending me back to the USA.

Okay, so you have the Jeremiah 12:5 issue, you know, the thing I hate - the misuse of Scripture they did as a secret code sort of way of telling you want they mean.  Sort of like how your parents maybe used to speak pig Latin, but I think Scripture would be best not used that way.  Pardon me for being a purist.

Jeremiah 12:5

New King James Version (NKJV)

The Lord Answers Jeremiah

⁵ “If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you,
Then how can you contend with horses?
And if in the land of peace,
In which you trusted, they wearied you,
Then how will you do in the floodplain^[a] of the Jordan?

I didn't need their sending me to the US to prove I could contend with horses.  Later in my service I would even prove that I could contend with horses continuing to avoid socialization - in Czechoslovakia and Romania.  And I did just fine with the horses.

As to the footmen?  I think the footmen need to learn better hermeneutics (rules for studying the Bible) in order to know how to use the Scripture in a manner closer to what it was originally intended and not abuse it.

The thing was that they could make this verse into a self-fulfilling prophecy if they wanted.  Of course they could.  That would be no problem for them.  It would be very easy for them to create a situation such that I couldn't contend with horses... in their ministry, or possibly ever, if they messed me up good enough.  After what I went through with them I don't doubt that they would have had the capacity to do anything they would have had to, maybe to get me out of there.

So, I think when they saw me off to the U.S., they just saw me as not much more than as someone who knew German, had some Bible school background, and the rudimentary skills of a secretary.  I think they thought I'd bitten at the explanation they'd given me for why they were sending me to the U.S. Then I started having interactions with the U.S. office and they didn't know anything about what I was thinking that I was starting my trials of how to do this double life with keeping my old self secret.  And they just saw how I was being social and friendly and cooperating, etc.  And everything seemed okay to them.  So basically I just learned to keep more to myself - even more than before.  So, I think when it finally caught up with them that something wasn't right, they still didn't understand what, except that I wasn't accepting everything, I wasn't fulling socialized as they thought, but they didn't know how or why, or what happened.  and they freaked out, started staying away from me.  They didn't know what they'd done to me and they didn't know how I couldn't stand them.

***

This is another take at a big swath of my time with the mission.  Sometimes it helps to look at things from different positions to better understand it, and that's one way to look at part of my time with the mission.

I've got to go now, so we'll pick up here with the next post.



 

459. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 9 (Greenberg, pt. 2)

Picking up right where I left off on the same article as the last post, the very next paragraph discusses research into unfair performance appraisals on the job, at work.  The reason this would not be applicable to the Vienna mission is that I have no evidence that my performance had anything to do with how I was treated.  So first we would have to get them to even instate performance appraisals or else provide good reason for the moves in my various positions.  ("I say so" does not constitute a "good reason.  "I say so" falls under "abuse of power", see post 457, commenting on the same article.)

Since this seems like a long shot no matter how you cut it - it would take a work of God, for sure - we'll skip that paragraph and move on to see if anything else might be applicable.  In any case, it's too late for me anyway, although other people might very well benefit from having ethical well-run performance appraisals.  Emphasis on ethical and well-run.  Otherwise don't bother.  We don't need any more of those stupid misuses of Scripture, which this would be a typical place they'd use it in.

***

Focusing on the more specific context of performance appraisal, Greenberg (1986) asked a sample of managers from several industries to describe episodes of especially fair or unfair performance appraisals.... The five determinants loading highly on the procedural factor... were soliciting input prior to evaluation and using it, two-way communication during interviews, ability to challenge/rebut evaluations, rater familiarity with ratee's work, and consistent application of standards.  The distributive justice factor consistent of two-determinants theorized to reflect the fair allocation of organizational outcomes in a performance apprasal context. (p. 406)

 Again,.we have to make some adaptations to the mission setting.  And the mission didn't actually have performance appraisals.  At least they didn't as far as I ever knew; maybe I wasn't in a position long enough to experience it.  A little irony there.

This description really destroys any possible hope I might have had of there ever being a valid performance appraisal system set up at the Vienna mission (it still exists, although it's location, etc. is different now).  The mission might solicit input prior to the appraisal, but I I doubt it, because the mission is not an egalitarian system, and while socially it has egalitarian strains, the actual functioning is very clear-cut as to roles and responsibilities and they want it that way - for security.  As long as they have so many missions working together and they feel like they have to bow to all of them they're not going to change.  So for them to ask for input is to put you and your opinion on equal footing.  Now try that for the whole mission - for everyone's appraisals.  It's not going to happen.  It might happen to a select few or between immediate supervisors, I suppose.

The thing is that, like in my case, the mission has it's own logic, and it's not necessarily the logic of the normal world, so the mission might have a decision about you, like they did about me, that did or did not have any correlation to me and my causation - my actions.  So in those cases, they're not going to particularly going to want my input.  They're maybe not even going to want an appraisal in the usual sense of the word.  So then maybe it's better to just scrap the appraisal altogether and only use it from time to time as needed.

And even if they did have performance appraisals, what was the likelihood the communication was going to be two-way?  I think it depends some on the people involved.  If it were an instructor and the team leader meeting, there would be more two-way and mutual respect, I think.  But not so much perhaps with the support staff, which I was a part of.  In my case, I mean regarding just me personally, I am not sure what I would do, because I never was exactly in this position and I'm not sure how it would go. They never complained of my work, so I'm not so sure about that, although they certainly could have found something, you know, if you look hard enough there was bound to be something or the other that I didn't do quite fast enough or good enough or whatever..

And then there was the familiarity with my work.  My boss, the one I raised money to work with, whose secretary I was supposed to be in the first place, didn't really know how to work with a secretary and I don't really think he knew what I did to do an appraisal on me to save his soul.  I hope he knows by now, since he's the director now.  He'd better know what his secretary does now.  If not his secretary might want to go in and explain it to him.

Ability to challenge/rebut evaluations.  I think this would be on my end, because I would be the one interested in challenging/rebutting an evaluation.  So that means that the mission would have to be open enough that missionaries would be able to challenge aspects of their evaluations.  This is no small thing, because it could be tearing at the very fabric of the mission.  Maybe the mission actually wrote the evaluation for a specific purpose that you don't know (such as because of having a father working in SDI at Boeing and wanting you out of there like a hot potato as a risk to the mission).  So allow the challenge could be going against some instruction from deep in the bowels of the organization.  Now try the challenge/rebuttal routine.  Chances are you're not going to get anywhere and the only thing you're going to get is a headache and more stress than you ever wanted.  And your standing with the mission just dropped a notch for all the fuss of trying.

Consistent application of standards.  Standards are very funny things.  They seem to disappear down a black hole as soon as you step foot in the Vienna mission.  After that the only standards that matter are the ones engraved in the minds of "the leadership," whoever that may be.  I'm a little nebulous there because I think the  "who" is whoever is having the most guiding impact on you at the moment.  So, for example, when I was in my office doing the job I was sent to Vienna to do my boss was the "who" of the moment.  The other thing was, of course, that I was moved around so much.

Even though I was supposed to be working for my boss, all the moves and these significant events during my time with the mission were carried out by others.  So it seems that they must have had standards that should have also been taken into account.   After we'd run everyone down that we thought should be included and added them in, then we'd maybe be in a position to have an idea what the standards were that needed to be applied.  I would really like that, but I don't think they would.

***

In one of the first studies in this area, Alexander and Ruderman (1987) administered a questionnaire to approximately 2,800 employees of the U.S. federal government.  They found that indices of these employees' assessments of procedural justice were significantly related to such key measures as their trust in management, intention to turnover, evaluation of their supervisor, conflict/harmony,and job satisfaction. Moreover, with the exception of turnover intention, procedural fairness judgments  accounted for significantly more variance in these dependent measures than distributed justice.  Apparently, both procedural and distributive justice judgments are important, althought each may be predictive of different attitudes.  This idea is consistent with Tyler's (1984) research on defendants' evaluations of their courtroom experiences.  Findings from this research revealed that procedural justice was strongly associated with defendants' attitudes toward the court  system, wheras distributive justice was strongly associated with defendants' satisfaction with verdicts... Extrapolating from such findings, Lind and Tyler (1988: 179) conclude that "procedural justice has especially strong effects on attitudes about institutions or authorities as opposed to the attitudes about the specific outcome in question." (p. 406)

Procedural justice we've already established is out the window as a hopeless case - as a general issue.

I've discussed trust some, I think, elsewhere, but it's been a long time.  It should be quite clear that I didn't trust the management.  They started off all wrong with me from the very beginning.   They just shouldn't have started with all this B.S., I don't care if it was for what they might have thought was socialization or if it was to drive me out of there because of my dad.  But as soon as I arrived on one hand I got some overwhelming welcoming that all but blew  me over that I thought was excessive so much as to be suspicious, especially when combined with me just spending week after week with a software manual as work to occupy me, and then a few other things besides to throw me off, like them continuing to insist that I live with the other secretary when I'd said I want to live alone.

So I wasn't sure what to make of the early things so I took a wait and see approach, doing what I'm supposed to do, but otherwise mostly observing to try to figure what's going on.  So even that was the beginning of not quite trusting the mission because something didn't seem quite right, but I wasn't really sure yet.  That was like the first 2-3 months.  After that the stress started builing up more and more as I continued to not give in and the stressors increased at work.  Needless to say the trust factor took a nose-dive as well. 

Evaluation of their supervisor.  My supervisors varied with the moves.  Fortunately, even though I moved positions 5 times, I only had 3 bosses.  My boss that I was supposed to have the whole time, the one that I had for 3 of the moves was nice.  He seemed uncertain, being new in the position himself.  Like I said before, he didn't know my job like he should have, but seeing he was new in his job there's a learning curve, so his boss's secretary was taking care of me if there were any issues I needed help with.  Mostly I did pretty basic secretarial stuff anyway, so it wasn't a difficult position no matter how you look at it.  Eventually there were times when it was busy, but it wasn't difficult, so it was like grunt work for me.

Conflict/harmony.  I'm not sure if there were any conflicts in the mission.  Generally everyone got along.  The thing was that we had to get along because of the ministry and we had to trust each other (I'm speaking sort of from the mission's stand point now) for security's sake.  If there was bickering or disagreement in the group I think the mission might have tried to intervene to find out what the problem was to resolve it because it wouldn't have wanted something like that to continue or, heaven forbid, spread.  So it was like living in Nirvana or something when you were in the mission because of the suppression of all these kinds of conflicts or any negativity to speak of.  If you had these kinds of thoughts you should just keep them to yourself because the mission wouldn't tolerate them.

This does raise a dilemma, however, if there really is a problem that needs addressing, but according to how this system is set up no matter how urgent or vital it won't get addressed (well, maybe a fire or a heart attack or something like that).  That's because it will just get quelched with all the rest of the negativity trivial or otherwise.  So there goes your means of redress right out the window, because the mission won't allow any negativity and your legitimate complaint falls within the category of negativity that should be quelched.

Job satisfaction.  I already just dealt with this one very recently.

***

The self-interest model (earlier referred to as the "instrumental perspective," (Tyler, 1987a; 333) suggests that people seek control over processes because they are concerned with their own outcomes. (p. 407-408)

I think that I must be a freak of nature because of all the missionaries that were working at the Vienna mission I apparently was the only one that was concerned with "my own outcomes."  and I sought control over processes.  I think that's maybe a little bit of the result of what happened, although that's not maybe  necessarily why.  But the thing is that given a lack of trust in an organization, that from my perspective appeared to want to completely change my whole way of thinking, I responded with a drive "to control processes" to hope for some influence on the outcomes.

At least that's how it's supposed to work, but in the mixed up world of the Vienna mission, I generally gave up expecting anything one way or the other.

***

In that study it was found that decision fairness was more strongly associated with the extent to which the decision represented was more strongly associated with the extent to which the decision represented the interests of all group members than the extent which it favored themselves.  Clearly, concern about the group good was an important element of fairness, part of the general notion that justice concerns are linked to group membership (Tyler & Lind, in press). (p. 409)

Certainly there were social norms, but these were norms not that just naturally evolved, but that were dictated from on high (or from deep inside - however you want to look at it).  Of course there were some things that evolved, like how they celebrate birthdays, but that's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about the things that are the meat and bones and that that aren't the types of things that mission was about to just let evolve by chance.  I really thing there was some social engineering there, but call it whatever you want, the mission, as I've said before, was more like a oligarchy than anything - like the Soviet Union.  The Board was at least if not more secretive and all-powerful  in relation to us as the as the Soviet Presidium was to the USSR.

So as far as group good was concerned, I really didn't have a very clear idea what the group good was.  I mean I guess I knew it was not in the group's best interests to go to Poland handing out Gospel tracks with the street address of the mission in them.  Actually, I knew that before I even came so I didn't need any socialization to tell me that.  But the group itself doesn't really decide it's own interests.  The department heads to have input into some decisions, logistical, etc. but generally, we're the sheep just shuffled around told what to do where, and when and how and with whom, and sometimes why.

I'm describing this from my perspective, you understand, so it may not be the same for everyone.

***

Greenberg (1986b) found that people believe that the outcomes resulting from unfair procedures are themselves unfair, but only when those outcomes are trivial; more beneficial outcomes were believed to be fair regardless of the fairness of the procedure. (p. 408)

So in Vienna there weren't actually outcomes, at least not the usual types of outcomes you'd expect at a job.  If you were to use anything at all as outcomes it would have to be opportunities for ministry.  If you look at it this way, you'd expect that that a positive outcome would be something like more opportunities for ministry and a negative outcome would lead to lesser opportunity.  If you look at it that way, then it is possible to see a trend pattern during my mission experience.  It goes like this (in brief):


I arrive in Vienna and I am taken aback at what I find at the mission so I go in a look and see mode while a work but don't really express my thoughts too much.  (But I'm getting involved in the Austrian church, have guests from the States visit, etc.)  Strange problems at work mount and I'm having more and more stress at work.  Leading to my return to the U.S.

I move to another office not right next to my boss for some reason that I don't understand.  I think this is a down grade.  It's a negative outcome.

This is negative outcome, but it's not exactly clear what I've done and this move has totally and forever destroyed my trust in the mission.  It's the absolute worst move they could have made.

I start part time work as receptionist in the U.S. office. This is still part of the negative outcome because I am exiled from my position and it is definitely a downgrade.

I fill in for the U.S. manager's secretary while she's on maternaty leave.  This is a bit of an upgrade.  They're testing me out I think to see if I'm okay to come back to Vienna.  So it's a positive outcome from where I was but it's still a negative outcome from where I'm supposed to be.

Then I finally return to Vienna to my old position.  This is a a positive outcome, but it's actually right where I started, so it's not really a positive outcome either.

Finally, the last move is to the receptionist position, where I stay until I leave.  That's a negative outcome and the final outcome as far as positions are concerned.

I never had control over any of these outcomes at all.  They were decided irregardless of anything I did or didn't do.  I wasn't cantankerous.  I did my work well.  I don't know.  But that's how they treated me.  And that's how they ruined my life, and that's just the surface, believe me.

So how can this be fair?  Is there a way under heaven that anyone in their right mind could possibly view this as being just, equitable, or whatever you want to call it?  Where is the procedure?  This passage speaks about the fairness of the procedure but I don't even have a clue what the procedure is because everything is done behind closed doors.  "That's the way things are dong around here."  What do you think?  Is that a satisfactory answer?

***

This article has a lot more good material in it, but it's really late not and I'd better head off and get some Zzzz's.

Thanks for stopping by.  This isn't the life I would have chosen, but God has given me the grace and strength to make it through some of these things.  And now I'm sick and have a hard time having much of a life so it's working out to finally work on this.

458. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 8 (Greenberg, pt. 1)

I'm feeling crummy today.  I'm not sure why, but I am.  I don't have stamina, and my legs start bothering me - maybe I need to do more exercises.  But I'm also having some nausea.  If it continues I'll probably have to see my primary care doctor, I guess.  I just got blood tests this morning, though, because they have to monitor me because of a biological medicine I'm on for rheumatoid arthritis.  I don't know that it necessarily has anything to do with that, but maybe the blood tests could show something.  All I know is I don't feel very well.  I feel better being seated or laying down.  Then I don't feel so bad.  Exce't my legs still bother me or sometimes my back hurts.  Speaking of which... yesterday I just realized I had gone for a full week without changing my Fentanyl patch!!! I'm supposed to change it every 3 days.  There was a time when it kept falling off and I was so afraid that they were going to think I was abusing them (it's a narcotic) for changing them too often.  I have gone for 4 or once I think maybe 5 days, but not 7, that's too much.  So you can tell I really am not abusing it anyway!

What a tedious life I live now.  I'm resorting back to my life as a toddler when mom said for the year when I was 2-3 and we were living at dad's mom's house in this real upscale neighborhood where the houses were far apart and I didn't have any friends to play with that she felt sorry for me but I was very good at just playing by myself.  So here I am again.  I wouldn't be here by choice, but health puts us in strange situations, doesn't it, and I can't complain, because even now I can look over my shoulder and there's a lake out the window, so it's not so bad, is it?

It is lonely though.  That it is.  Everyone says that no man is an island, but sometimes I feel like I am, not that I want to be. 

The next text is:

Greenberg, Jerald. (1990). Organizational Justice: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Journal of Management, 16(2), 399-432.

***

Historically, the equity theory of Adams... has been given the greatest attention by organizational scientests in issues of justice... This theory claims that people compare the ratios of their own perceived work outcomes (i.e., rewards) to their own perceived work inputs (i.e., contributions) to the corresponding ratios of a comparison other (e.g., a co-worker). (p. 400)

First of all, as I've said before, since this wasn't a regular place of employment, the Vienna mission didn't dole out the same kind of rewards and the like as you'd find back home on the job.  So you have to adjust it to the context at hand.  Since new missionaries came in at various times it was, I think, hard for them to know if they were progressing on schedule or not because they didn't really have a cohort to compare themselves to.  But once you were socialized then I think you more or less did.  You could compare yourself to others in your department, for example.  But I don't think this kind of thing was really encouraged because there had to be such a high level of trust and camaraderie that to think like that would tear that all down.  So I doubt the mission would put up with that kind of thing.  I wouldn't be surprised though if there was some of this fostering underneath the surface here and there in the mission.  It would be the kind of thing where a certain individual was given a choice assignment when another person thought s/he would get it and really wanted it.  That kind of thing.  "Choice," of course, is all relative, and I couldn't even begin to tell you what that might be, just whatever that person thought it was.

Where this relates to me in the mission, for one thing, is that there would be no way for me to know that it was unusual to have been moved around so much from position to position except in comparison to everyone else... and I mean EVERYONE else.  Absolutely everyone.  From the director down to the gardener.  I don't care who you are, no one absolutely no one except me got moved around as much as me.  There was one girl that got moved around one time and she wasn't even a missionary and I got moved around 5 times.  So that's equity theory for you.  Now sit back and think really hard, do you think that I felt like I was treated with any equity by the Vienna mission those two years that I was with them?

If you guessed no, you are correct.  Bingo.  You're catching on.

***

Individuals are theorized to adjust theor own or the comparison other's actual or perceived inputs or outcomes in order to change unpleasant inequitable states to more pleasant ones... These reactions may be classified as being either behavioral... or psychological... (p. 400-401)

The thing with this was I wasn't sure of the causes of the inequitable states.  It's a lot easier to make adjustments when you know what the causes are.  In normal work situations you might have a bad work review or something of that nature and you're told up front what the issue is or if you applied for an inside job and didn't get it you might be able to find out why you didn't get it.  But in my case it was not so easy.

And I didn't think I had really done anything wrong.  They wanted my heart and soul and that was the theme I sort of came away with from those two years and felt I couldn't give them because I thought they would give me theirs in return and for being a Christian mission, despite their polished exterior they could be a monster inside.  So short of giving them my heart and soul, what could I do, sort of play along, which is what I ended out doing.  But it still didn't work, because they still moved me around.

If the issue ultimately was my dad (and his work in Star Wars at Boeing), then there wasn't anything I could have done to right things, no matter what I did.

***

Research using simulated legal decisions consistently has found that verdicts resulting from procedures offering disputants process control were perceived as fairer and were better accepted than identical decisions resulting from procedures that denied process control (e.g., Walker, Lind, & Thibaut, 1979)

As additional research was conducted on this phenonomenon (for reviews, see Lind & Tyler, 1988, 1988; Tyler, 1987), it became clear that this finding was reflective of a more general tendency across a variety of settings for procedures granting control over the process of outcome attainment to be perceived as fairer than procesures that deny process control... (p.403)

This is the same kind of logic that kept me from wanting to trust the Vienna mission as far as any kind of grievance may have been concerned.  I didn't see any possibility for this kind of "process control" - not one iota of it at all.  Any semblance of it would have been simply a mockery of the term, with no real resemblance to the real thing.  So you can see how much faith I had in the mission, my sending mission, and all the leadership involved.  That really does pretty well give you an idea of where my faith in them was.

***

Whereas Thibaut & Walker... emphasized the importance of process control, the approach to procedural justice offered by Leventhal focused on other aspects of procedural justice.  Specifically, Leventhal postulated that various procedural elements (e.g., the selection of decision-makers, setting ground rules for evaluating potential rewards, methods of gathering information, procedures for defining the decision process, procedures for appeals, safeguards against abuse of power, and the availability of change mechanism) are used to evaluate the fairness of outcome-distribution procedures.  The fairness of the procedures, he asserted, is evaluated relative to their meeting several criteria: namely, the extent to which they suppress bias, create consistent allocations, rely on accurate information, are correctable, represent the concerns of all recipients, and are based on prevailing moral and ethical standards.

So all of these things describe what was wrong at the Vienna mission in my opinion.  But I have to explain myself, because otherwise it might not be on the surface immediately evident.

Well the selection of decision-makers hardly counts because it's just the people in the highest positions.  People pretty much stayed in their positions, so it was just the obvious people, the director and assistant director, department heads, the Board, the H.R. department.  So I'm not even going to deal with that one.  The only thing there is that why are they having U.S. military chaplains run the H.R. department?  I thought that was pretty darn strange.  And that was an important issue for me because that could have affect regarding my dad's work.  So that does lose some neutrality for me.  If I need to feel like they were going to come up with fair decisions regarding my treatment, they (both of the chaplains/H.R. staff) would have to be taken off the team to make decisions about me.

But you know if they do that then what's going to happen is that the rest of the team that's left deciding my fate are going to sneak out the back door to consult with them anyway to know what to do with me.  Sure, they're not stupid!  These guys they chitchat in the hall all the time and my boss and his boss are just down the hall from them on the 3rd floor! 

Most of these things are irrelevant, so I'm skipping them.

Procedures for appeals.  This should have been in place long before I came to Vienna.  It's really attrocious that it wasn't.  I understand that it might have been a bit different with all of the missions involved, but there should have been some kind of a policy for how it started at the mission and when the sending mission got involved if it did.  It's attrocious that there wasn't such a thing in place, but it's just along the same lines as not having a functional staff manual.  I don't care what your asinine socialization says.  The missionaries have rights too.  So there should be a functioning staff manual that has in it clearly spelled out the procedures for appeals.

And here's my favorite: safeguards against abuse of power.  The constitution of the mission needs to have a section in it that includes a section on the safeguards of the abuse of power.  Maybe not.  Unfortunately, the kind of abuse of power I experience in the mission is a slippery abuse of power and the only way it's going to get better is for people to do something - the missionaries, supporters, churchers, whoever.

On the outside it doesn't look like abuse of power.  If you go to a meeting it doesn't look like abuse of power.  But it's all encompassing to those who work there and if you just dare to cross it you'll soon find out what abuse of power looks like.  If you stay in the good graces it's very nice, otherwise, and you can't see a thing.  Everything looks normal.  It might be, though, that those who were there when I was and saw how I was treated saw a glimpse of what the Mission was capable of.  But everyone saw different pieces of how I was treated and heard different things about it - maybe the leadership even had an official story about me, explanation for my departure.  So I expect everyone came to difference conclusions, and I was probably a bit of an enigma.  But the thing was that how they had treated me was, in my opinion, an abuse of power.  Sure I was in a foreign country away from where there would be witnesses I knew to verify what they did to me.  But just because I am there does not give them liberties to treat me like that.  Does not give them liberties to treat anyone like that.  They treat everyone like that, it's just that others give in.  That's an abuse of power if you ask me.

You can't say - "Hah, now there are no witnesses that this person knows so we can treat him/her however we want to get him/her to become the way we want to be!"  That is abuse of power, plain and simple and that is what the Vienna mission did to me and I think it did it to everyone, really in its socialization.  That's part of what it banks on for that process.  It's not only being in a foreign country - it's not having witnesses; no one will believe you.  It's you all alone against the big mission.  Even couple and families aren't together all day and it may be hard to explain to each other what they are experiencing.

But the other thing is the values issue, if people are required to submit total faith and be completely open to being counseled according to the ways of the mission this leaves a huge opening for the possibility of the abuse of power and I am in no certain terms satisfied that there are any safeguards to protect against the abuse of said powers.  The mission abused Scripture left and right - such as the use of Jeremiah 12:5 (which I have recently been referring to, that they used with me before sending me back to the US for counseling 5 months into my term with them), so we know that Scripture was not a good safeguard for them because they would have been just as likely to twist and turn it however they wanted to their own end.  And these are theologians, I'm talking about, but they believed in ends justifies the means and this was one aspect of that philosophy in action.

I never saw the heart of the mission because I refused to accept their beliefs.  That's the part of me that I worked hard to keep secret, that if they only knew  all the things I disagree with them on they would have had me shot at sunset, so to speak.  So they didn't know my thoughts, but they weren't there thoughts.

***

However, given the general managerial context of the study, it was not surprising that several additional principles emerged.  For example, rules regarding, "providing adequate information," and "assigning challenging and meaningful work" were among those principles reported by Sheppard and Lewicki's respondents, but which were not contained in earlier writings on justice. (p. 405)

Generally speaking, I don't remember there being a real problem with "providing adequate information."  I always had enough information.  And where there wasn't an incredible lot of information to go on, that was generally in a situation where I had some leeway to set some things up on my on to organize offices and the like.  The one time where this could possibly be an issue if you count the time before I had arrived in Vienna and I asked them which word processor they used so that I could take a class in it before I came to learn it (this was in the '80s and I didn't know all the software).  Then when I arrived in Vienna they set me up with a manual to learn the program and that's what I did for a few weeks at least.

However, "assigning challenging and meaningful work" is most defnitely a hot button issue.  I was supposed to be the secretary of the assistant director, and I would say that I was fully functioning in that position maybe 6 months of the 24 months I was with the mission.  The rest of the time was basically in this category.  And my supporters were paying for it.  How do you think I felt.  Well I kept up a sunny disposition and didn't let on but it could feel like I was a joker or something.  Who was I fooling, smiling when all this is happening?  And the mission believed me?  My parents even believed me.  So you can guess how good of an actress I was, right?

I mean, really, imagine this.  I take a women's trip to Vienna, finally.  So now they know I can teach and they've seen me several times in Czechoslavia, so they finally see a little bit of what I can do.  Then my parents come - sometimes I think they only sent me on the women's ministry trip because my parents were coming, so they could show them I was getting ministry opportunity.

Then practically as soon as they leave I'm ushered down to the receptionist position.  Like it was all a show!  How do you think I feel?  I'm not stupid after all.  I know what's going on.  Remember I'm holding on to my old values and I don't agree with the mission's ways like everyone else anyway.  So I can still think for myself.  I just can't show it.  So I have to do the thinking at home in my apartment where no one can see me.

I'm a fool.  Really, that was my position in the mission.  How can anyone not think that I could not have noticed this and somehow had to find a way to live with it or accept it or something.  I would have hoped that those who knew me knew me well enough that they would have seen that doing that kind of work was antithetical to what I was capable of.  The problem was that my parents didn't believe me that I had worked so hard to keep my identity intact.

[I'm writing this a couple days later.  The problem regarding my parents believing me was two-fold.  First of all, I couldn't express myself as clearly as I can with the help of these articles that are helping me understand what was happening even more than I did at the time.  I mean, I did have some very specific consciousness of what I was doing but there was a huge amount of gray area where everything was a jumble and I was doing my best to make my way through the ambiguity and all.  So if I couldn't understand it that well, how could I explain it to others?  So that was a problem.

But the other issue was dad's work.  There were, I think different ways how dad's work may have come in, and as soon as I was out of the way and not affecting dad's work any more, dad would have been glad to point the finger at me as being the problem to make sure that he's off the hook maybe, so that there couldn't possibly be any link to his work as having caused my problems.  (But I came back so weak anyway that he hardly needed to worry about that one; I was hardly a threat to him at that point.)

 On the surface he made it look like he saw this kind of thing all the time - how I was treated by the mission - and it was just a failure of nervous breakdown  or the like, and he lost a lot of respect for me from that.  Weakness was a big deal in his family, from his father's ingraining it in him and he passed this value on at least subconsciously this way to us kids as adults.  on the other hand, I lost respect for him when I saw him doing this - responding to me in this way. Mom had said to me as a teenager that dad cared what people thought and now I was feeling the brunt of it, understood what she meant.  On the other hand, he never abandoned me, but still, this type of thing wasn't good either, and it's messed up the family too.  My one brother needs anger counseling but if he sees it as a weakness like this, he'd never in a million years get it, but that's how  mom ended out getting emotionally and verbally abused.  My other brother is controlling with his boys, but is certainly a lot better.  There are lots of things that are worse than being weak, and my situation in Vienna was a particular situation that was unique especially and, honestly, I've been tested at universities up and down the East coast in recent years, despite having conditions that often have comorbidities with things like depression and all and I've been told that they can't find anything wrong with me or they pick at straws digging for things.  So I'm emotionally healthy and that situation in Vienna was because of the stress they put me under and I pulled myself together and somehow managed to live a double life keeping my values.  So that should tell you something that I'm not a complete psycho or something.  Then a year after leaving the mission I started on my Masters and not long after that I went to live in Siberia, where I lived for several years.



But despite the fact that dad had labeled me (at least in part) a failure didn't change my values , because I didn't think that that was how people should be judged and it didn't change my tune as far as what I knew happened in Vienna, even if I had trouble expressing it to others.  So this must be what babies feel like when they can't express themselves.  It's really a terrible feeling.  And when I came home from Vienna and I realized I was completely misunderstood by everyone I felt like a complete stranger there.  But no one could fathom it.  My family might have sensed I was a bit changed, but they probably thought I'd get over it or something.  This is what I mean when I say my parents didn't believe me about keeping my identity intact.  It's because they would have had to appreciate the attrocities of how the mission treated me, and I was having trouble explaining them, and same with the extent of the extent of the emotional aspects of what was going on, as well as the relations to dad's work, which dad may not have known about.] 

 

***

I'm going to end here.  This article is going to have a lot more to comment on too.

457. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 7 (O'Driscoll & Beehr, pt. 1)

This next article is a quantitative research study carried out in the U.S. and New Zealand.

O'Driscoll, Michael P. and Beehr, Terry A. (1994). Supervisor behaviors, role stressors and uncertainty as predictors of personal outcomes for subordinates. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15, 141-155.

***

Two assumptions underlying the present study are (a) that one important realm of influence which control is the degree of uncertainty personnel have to contend with in their work environment, and (b) that uncertainty is a predictor of work-related effect, strain and behavior intentions.  We argue that, through their interactions with subordinates, supervisors may reduce or, alternatively, exacerbate the amount of uncertainty confronted by employees within an organization.  Supervisors' behavior may be quite critical for alleviating or increasing the ambiguity and unpredictability which subordinates feel about their job tasks, about managemenet, and about the social and political dynamics of the organization. (p. 141-142)

Bingo!  And if you just happen to be working for the Vienna mission, where ambiguity in the work place is a standard operating procedure - particularly during the socialization process, but not even completely isolated to that initial period of the worker's time with the mission.  It's just that at the beginning it's heaped on him/her and s/he is taken by surprise and doesn't have the coping skills yet to deal with it and hasn't come to grips with it yet.  Because half the battle is coming to grips with it; that is, you have to sort of decide agree to live in/with this ambiguity, which means that you aren't the one pulling the shots and you don't really know what's going on.  So you're taking a huge Kierkegaardean leap of faith and you have to really believe that the mission is on the straight, has your best interest in mind, is doing what it says it is doing, etc., because you're laying your life on the line that it is doing these things.  Literally, because you're going behind the lines into Communist countries doing church work and they might even think you're spies if they find out you're doing church work.  So that's pretty serious. 

But when I arrived in Vienna and the ambiguity I first face wasn't just from my "Supervisors' behavior." At least not directly and openly from his behavior.  But management can give other orders that don't come directly from them that cause ambiguity also, and I'm pretty certain that the computer problems and some of the other problems at work may have been of that nature.  But then I'm not sure how they decided how to "socialize" me, it may have been by committee, but that's still management and my supervisor, who was the assistant director of the mission, most certainly would have been involved in the process, no matter how unassuming he could come off.

Even things like at the end when I was working at the reception desk and I was supposed to keep track of who was in the building so I knew how to route calls or take messages, etc.  And people would NOT tell me when they left no matter how many times I asked them to do so.  This was deliberate and created a sense of ambiguity for me because it made me feel uncertain about my status in the organization and unrespected.  This wasn't done by the supervisor, but the organization was such an in sync organism that things didn't always need to come from the supervisor or management, and then this could free up the management and leadership from having to take any responsibility for doing the dirty work, which, of course, was a very convenient thing. 

All I can say is that I have never ever worked anywhere where there has been so much ambiguity, including in Siberia or Seoul, S. Korea.  That's part of why I had to do these studies with these articles because my mind was such a muddle about what happened but my life was so destroyed by those two years with the mission, and it was incredibly worse than anything Russia did to me.  It's like the saying that the American Jews graffitied on our mission working with Soviet Jews in the '80s in the U.S.: "The Nazis killed Jews bodies, but you are killing Jews souls."  Of course, we didn't see it as killing Jews souls, but the comparison was graffic, and you could see how from their standpoint they could feel that way.  So for me, the Vienna mission tried to kill my soul, but Russia tried to kill me.  I'm not exactly sure Russia tried to kill me, but I think it came pretty close because I was in pretty bad shape in their hospital there were some pretty shady things there that went on and no one knew I was there except my then husband. (Later believers from the house church I was going to ran me down, but it was after the worst was over.)  

The ambiguity in the Vienna mission was a given and everybody had a certain amount of it and it was just something you just had to get used to, but not like what I went through.  What I went through was over the top and to say it was intended as training for me to be able to contend with horses (Jer. 12:5) was beyond believability.  There is no way that what they put me through could train me for anything other than trying to get me out of there or having a breakdown (if I won't get out of there on my own free will).  And, of course, the other thing, is that they would have been interested in protecting my father, so they would have had that extra directive (the word is used intentionally - remember the H.R. staff are U.S. reserve chaplains, and one of the lead missions takes money from the C.I.A. and my father had an intelligence aspect of his job as SDI program manager at Boeing) to make sure I'm in a position that keeps dad safe.  My personality and background, values included, would not have made this very easy. 

So here we are back at my dad again.  It's hard to deny that my treatment by the mission was extraordinary and everyone knew it.   And when I started to get rumors, people telling me about different positions, possibilities of this or that thing going to happen that I might be a part of, I didn't know whether to believe it.  That's because the ambiguity was too much and I was too much on the outs so I did hope some, but I mostly chose not to act on these things.  This was ambiguity.  A very clear example of what I mean, but it was all the time and this is just one thing. 

***

Similarly, role conflict has been shown to be related to unfavorable personal outcomes, although typically the association is not as strong as for ambiguity. (p. 143)

There was some role conflict, if you will recall (if you have been reading along, that is), but even that involved some ambiguity because it wasn't out and out role conflict.  That is, my boss didn't outright say that I had to stop attending the Austrian church, for example or being told by H.R. that galavanting about on my own (such as taking the Spanish cooking class) was prohibited for staff to do.  Nothing was that straightforward or cleancut.  That would be too easy.  Rather, it was left to the world of ambiguity and social pressures and tips from the inner sanctum if one appeared ready and in the right spirit to learn more about the desires of the leadership.  Otherwise, the ambiguity remained.

There were, of course, roles that missionaries at the mission had to balance, such as family roles and responsibilities in the mission.  Those would be the main roles of this type, I think.  This includes issues around children and their schooling.  But the mission had taken this into account and this wasn't so much the issue that I'm talking about.  (Part of how this was dealt with, incidently, was that secretaries worked with their boss's kids and befriended their lonely homebound wives that might be jealous of them (the secretaries) spending all the time with their husband all day at work.  At least this is how it was explained to me.)

So then what it comes down to is other types of roles.  In fact, it might just only be my external roles to the mission because I dared to have roles outside the mission.  It is possible that I wasn't the only person that had ever had the problem of external role conflict that became a problem and led to some ambiguity, but I'm pretty certain that I'm the only one that stuck with it so long.

These were the preconditions that led to me having the role conflicts:

1) being assigned a position (secretary) that I was not satisfied with and felt overqualified for,
2) knowing the local language, at least somewhat
3) having Bible school training and some missions background
4) having previously spent 2 months (with a mission and also a few days with a university) in the city)

There was at least one other female staff that I think could have been a candidate for role conflict, but I'm not sure if she had or not experienced it because she had already been there so much longer than I and I didn't have any chance to really discuss this with her.

The thing, then, is that all these things had to converge together.  Then I felt this sort of ambiguous sense that there was a disapproval, but there was a disapproval for everything about me it seemed.

And then, of course, I'm told I have culture shock.  Is that their ultimate disapproval?  How ambiguous is that?  And all the time I'd been doing just great at the Austrian church and I much preferred being with the Austians over the Americans.  At least the Austrians made sense.  Let's just say I much prefer the Austrian and Russian horses to the American footmen (Jer. 12:5 - the verse the H.R. director/U.S. reserve military chaplain used in his send off back to America for counseling for "culture shock").

***

[O]ne proposition examined in the present research was that role ambiguity and conflict are perceived environmental stressors which induce uncertainty in a person about the performance of tasks of about the outcomes that are dependent upon successful task performance. (p. 143)

This is not as clearcut as it might seem.  For me in the Vienna mission, a good part of the problem was that I was constantly being moved about, so it was difficult to think that I was really leaving a mark on the mission.  And from the very beginning I was doing trivial things that were way beneath what I could have been doing.  Even just volunteering at a research center I was making more of a mark than what I was doing there in a two year mission supported term.  It was degrading.  And I felt absolutely demeaned.  That's on the macro level.

On the micro level I knew I was doing what I was supposed to do to the best of my ability and that they were pleased with it.  But at the same time, I also knew that the micro level was often - but not always grunt work.  At the very beginning what I was doing was absolutely nonessential and I might as well have not been there.  There was no good purpose in my being there unless they were seeing it as being for my socialization.

But a lot of the time I felt like it was just a test to see how I would do and they might not even care that much.  For example, when I was sent to the receptionist desk.  I had so much time on my hands it was ridiculous so I decided to re-organize the supply and ordering system, which I didn't have to do.  I guess they appreciated it, but it was sort of a joke too, because they just had me their as a retainer biding time until I left and that was all. 

There never was a benchmark or anything by which to determine if you had successfully completed a task; it wasn't that kind of place anyway and I don't know if anyone had that luxury.  But in my case I never even knew if successful task completion was what they were really after, or if it was something else and the task was just a ploy to get to something else that they were really after.  That's how it felt, but it was a moving target, so that I can't say that it was always the same.  And there you get more ambiguity. 

Can you begin to imagine how it could have been hell on earth and how hard it would have been to maintain one's sanity in this kind of context?  It was wild.  And to explain it is just... it's almost beyond words.  You had to be me living it, really.  I don't know how else to say it.

***

So now we get to the results of this study and here is one finding.

In particular, there were strong indications that role ambiguity was closely related to job dissatisfation and to psychological strain, while role conflict was associated with strain and with turnover intentions.  Uncertainty appeared to be directly connected with lack of job satisfaction, rather than with the two other outcomes variables. (p. 151)

So there you have it in black and white.  As some might say, it's not rocket science, no?  I mean it's not like you should be shocked out of your pants to learn this truth.  It's not like learning for the first time that the earth revolves around the sun or something, right?  Well, I mean, it might just solidify something you had a hunch about but now it's more certain, like a truth.  Of course, the way with research studies is that they have to study it in other settings, with other populations and other researchers have to confirm it, etc., etc. but you know what I mean. 

Was I happy in Vienna?  Well, I put on a good show, for sure, but I've been a wreck ever since I left there because they ruined me and inside I was anything but happy.  I was scared spitless.  More than anything else I was afraid of them.  But there was also a good dose of anger in there, and hurt, grieving because this was my career that I just buried somewhere and didn't deal with for 2 years till I came home to the States for good.

So it's clear I had job dissatisfaction, and for good reason, for all the times they moved me around - and they didn't treat anyone else that way, and I'm not stupid, so anyone in their right mind would have job dissatisfaction.  I had so much psychological strain it was a miracle I didn't come home in a straight jacket and that just testifies to my fortitude and scrappiness for finding a way to survive in that social climate.  So you just know that I am a turnover intention just waiting to happen because I meet all the criteria left and right and it's a wonder it didn't happen sooner except I was afraid to leave my term early.  So when my two year term was up you bet your booties my turnover intention was not just an intention it was a fact and it happened right on schedule at the end of my two years.

It turns out I fit the description perfectly.

I would also like to say that the mission leadership was pretty stupid for thinking that I might be happy working with them after how they treated me.  They didn't know who they were dealing with it seems.

***

That's the end of this article.  It's another pretty emotional one.  It looks like this file seems to be full of these kinds of articles.  They touch on subjects that really hit home and help me describe what happened when I was in Vienna.  It's these aspects that won't be picked up in a lot of other places because I was so scared to even write about my feelings realy.  The mission had me that terrified. 

No one should have to go through that.  And the worst thing is that these were Christians, Christian leaders.  So it has undermined my faith in the Christian church.  It hasn't undermined my faith in God though, just the Church.

You know this isn't the kind of thing I'd just make up or something.  I hope you understand that.   It's my real life.  It's hard on the Internet, and with me using a pseudonym it doesn't help.  I'm not ready to use my real name yet.  I'm afraid I'm going to have a lot of enemies bombarding me and eventually I guess I might have to get ready for that, but I'm not ready yet.

455. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 5 (Furby, pt. 2)

So this is one of those cases that we actually get beyond pt. 1 in the article.  Sometimes it does seem silly to have the "pt. 1" in the articles, but then situations like this come up and then it's worth it.  Or, of course I could just leave the "pt. 1" off unless I end out going past more than one post for an article.  In the end I guess it's not all that important.

So let's just get back to where we left off...

***

"...people in an experimental setting will view allocations 'in terms of retaining what they have been led to believe is the rightful and direct consequence of their own, individual action" rather than in terms of "meting out just shares resulting from a common enterprise" (p. 16). This individualistic bias has been evident in other areas of psychology as well (e.g., Furby, 1979) and is consistent with the individualistic ideology in Western, industrialized society (Weber, 1930). (p. 160; The quotes were from Cohen (1983), as identifed a bit earlier in the paragraph.)

Technically this was not a problem at all in the Vienna mission because this was exactly the type of thing that the socialization worked out of the newcomers.  Also, "allocations" in the missions setting is not the same as in a corporate setting anyway so, you have to keep that in mind as well.  Nevertheless, if they were used to thinking of their good works helping to get them ahead - such as moving up the academic ladder (there were a lot of teaching theologians in the bunch, remember).  So that wasn't going to happen here.  It was a group affair and any sign of a nail sticking up it was going to get pounded down - taking from a Japanese saying.  And that was me really, because whereas they has put everyone else in positions relatively resembling the work they really did and using their skills, I was the worst fit and I just did not feel like I could ever ever accept the image they had of me, I don't care what the group concern was.  No one had to face as total a remake as I would have had to. 

And the thing is that even if I did accept the group pressure and everything went well and I became a successful part of the group and was given more ministry opportunities.  The thing is that they would have still undermined the part of me that was all the background in Eastern European studies, religion in Eastern Europe, language studies, and being able to think for myself regarding all the studies I'd done in research about religion in Eastern Europe.  They would have wanted me to give all that up as if I didn't have that and just rely on them.  I wasn't supposed to come with all that background because that would make me more independendent, and it might even make me more knowledgeable than some of those above me so it was a threat to them probably.  So that was unacceptable. 

So all that would have had to go.  And what would I have been left with?  A shell of a person.  A completely different person.  But when I left Vienna what was I left with?  A shell of a person.  A completely different person. 

I didn't think like this when I was there because some things were hard to grasp and wrap your mind around.  It was a miracle I was able to understand as much as I did, I think.  So I missed some things.  And some things I'm not getting until now as I go through these articles. 

I think the difference between staying and leaving, even though the above statements make it look like the end is the same, is that if I stayed I'd be grinding it out more and more so it would be continuing to have its effect and I'm not sure where it would have eventually led to.  So you'd have to take that into consideration.  All I can say is at the time I was scared spitless, which is how I was able to not tell anyone anything.  It was the fear that kept me going and that fueled the poker face that hid all the thoughts and pain and anger they didn't know about underneath the sweet demeanor and endless agreeableness.  So you know that's a whole lot of fear to be able to do that.  I never ever had that kind of fear in the Soviet Union, even though I lost my child under questionable circumstances and the garbage I put up with my undoubtedly arranged husband 5 time zones from Moscow out in the middle of nowhere.  Nope.  I never had fear there, really, and the Vienna mission absolutely terrified me.  And I'm talking about an Evangelical born-again Christian mission.

And I came home to the U.S. and I thought my sending church would be supportive and maybe check into what happened, but all they did was sort of take my had and say there-there, it'll be all right.  That's how I felt.  So I sort of drifted away from that church, absolutely disillusioned.

***

Another difficulty with psychological experiments on justice is the fact they are interpreted solely in terms of justice concerns, whereas one or more other motives are often involved such as politeness, fear of retaliation, status assertion, and impression, and impression management... Follow-up interviews indicated that children knew perfectly well that their self-interested allocations in response to the former instructions were not necessarily "fair." (p. 161)

These children were told to share "as you want" and then "so it's right."  In Vienna I don't even think that the mission even really needed to do a lot of socializing into this, but I suppose that it could have come up here and there in the occasional individual.  The thing is that as missionaries generally they should have been pretty high up on the moral ladder (although judging by how they treated me, that does raise a big question mark, doesn't it?), and as such I don't think the share issue was a major issue.  At least it wasn't as far as I knew of.  I think that if issues came up they might have wanted to keep them localized as much as possible (such as in a department), so then I might not have heard about it.  Still, it wasn't that big of an organization and if something was at all common I think I'd have had an idea of it.  But I don't remember it.

The thing here, then is specifically how I fit in the mission.  The status assertion was a big one, really, and I don't think I can overstate it.  The mission absolutely insisted not only in making me being a secretary, which is one thing and I had agreed to, but also in branding me and making me sort of forever join the ranks of secretary-hood.  Really, it was like if there was a caste system, I was being sent down to the absolute lowest rank... well maybe the second lowest, because there was the gardener and the receptionist (as I eventually found out later) who was still lower. 

There was that, but then it was silly, because I wasn't even a secretary, so it was stupid that they were so insistent, I thought.  I had never even expressed an interest in becoming a professional secretary. 

I most definitely had a fear of retaliation, but it wasn't a fear that an individual would retaliate, because the mission wouldn't allow for that kind of pettines, but that the mission would retaliate.  The mission would retaliate for just not agreeting with it or attempting to fall out of line to do your own thing.  But retaliation could be subtle or in your face.  The subtle things the mission would deny knowing anything about and the in your face things the mission would deny having anything to do with retaliation.  But you just sort of knew.

As to impression management, I'm a little more flexible there.  I don't have to be front and center stage, which is why I didn't respond so well when I was given the uber-flattery when I first arrived.  It was just too much and struck me as strange.  I'm not the type that really needs it.  Sure, I like some encouragement and acknowledgment, but not like that.  So I'm willing to give some in impression management and I can sit in the background and I'm willing to just sit and watch and see what's going on.  I'm okay with that.  Does this make sense?

So justice, as the author says, is one thing, but then you have these other issues too.   The thing is that the mission does not negotiate with anyone - well, I don't know - maybe if you're a famous professor, but I wasn't famous enough, I guess, despite all the hype they heaped on me when I first arrived.  So justice was what the mission decided it was, and that's the end of the story.  At least, that was what my experience with the mission.  If you didn't like it, tough luck Charlie, you could just leave.  And maybe that's just what they wanted me to do because of my dad (and his work in the U.S. Star Wars - which they could have known about via the two U.S. military reserve chaplains comprising the H.R. department).

 ***

Thibaut and Walker (1975) found that perceived fairness of procedures affects satisfaction with those procedures, independent of outcomes. (p. 163)

Since there were no objective written rules and guidelines - that were effective by any stretch of the imagination, I mean - then we were left to our own devices to determine what "fairness" might mean.   Since we were all Christians and it was an Evangelical mission, the Bible might be a good place to start.  Of course, there was the individual conscience, which in this case would be mine.  And finally, there would be the social norms of the mission.  The problem with that latter alter ego is that I never really understood it well; it always sort of eluded me.  That being said, I did feel like I understood it better in certain areas than others.

This is a very serious issue and one that deserve biblical addressing, but I believe that some of my discussions on posts 164 and aspects of the discussion in post 218 deal with the issue fairly well.  I think there may be one or two other places that I touch on it as well.  It's not something to be taken lightly, in my opinion; God's idea of "fairness" isn't necessarily the same as ours, but He isn't an unjust Judge either. But it's hard, in my opinion, to isolate the issue of "fairness" from everything else regarding the mission, and how it is answerable to God for how it operated in general.  These other posts address that a bit and I deal with other aspects of the mission in relation to  Scripture elsewhere in the blog as well.

I suspect, although I can't know for certain, that members of the Vienna mission, learned with time to just not really think in terms of fairness, or to bury that type of thinking deep enough in their psyche for the duration of the time they were with the mission that it wasn't a problem for them.  Alternately, some may have maintained their fairness reasoning just below the radar, where they could sense it, but it was undetectible to others.  If this was the case, then there would have been others living secret lives more or less like I did, but they cooperated more.  And they didn't have a father in Star Wars either probably to complicate things. 

The management probably would have expected the theologians to live like this and wouldn't have gotten away with totally eraticating their id, if you will.  But that's what it felt like they wanted to do with me.  In this case, they thought that secretaries weren't intelligent enough and they could get away with doing this kind of thing with secretaries because they wouldn't have the intelligence to fight back and know what was going on. 

Part of my problem was that I didn't have the prestigious position to rally support behind me.  So that was a huge drawback against me.  And to top it off, I was female.  You know how much status females have in evangelical churches?  Enough to be secretaries, for sure, and maybe lead preschool Sunday school.  But in my church, women's ministry hadn't even evolved beyond support for missions. 

So even if I did have something close to the knowledge of the theologians - especially when you count in the Eastern European expertise - I didn't have the prestige to rally support.  And the more time went on the mission kept knocking me down more and more, which just knocked my self-confidence down.  And if my self-confidence is knocked down and I don't have great prestige to start with (but I might have had some if I'd known how to work it when I got home), then what are the chances that I could rally support?  And the mission had done everything it possibly could to discredit my testimony. 

Under such conditions, what am I supposed to say, that I am jumping with joy and just oversatisfied with the fairness of the mission's procedures and the outcomes they produced?  I don't think so?  Do I think that the mission was biblical in its operations - in general, not just in how it treated me? No, not at all!  That's a good chunk of why I had a hard time joining their inner circle.  And why I'm glad that I kept my values intact.

People need to know what goes on in these kinds of missions, that it's not all cookies and cream.  Lay out your values straight and plain so that people like me who don't like the type of values espoused by the mission in their actual day in and day out can have a chance to opt out instead of having the wool pulled over our eyes.  Yes, that means supporters.  There may be a few who don't like it.

 ***

This has taken hours to write and my day is half over.  We still have a ways to go in the text too, so this is a very meaty text it's turning out to be.

I had to go back over a lot of the older posts trying to find the links to the posts with the verses in them that I wanted, and I realized that in one of the times when I had had to make adjustments to the numbering systems it seems like the post numbers in the "Scripture Reference" page are off, so that's a bummer.  I have so much to do and I don't see getting to it in the near future, so, unfortunately, it's going to have to stay that way.  I'll just have to add a note at the top that I know that some of these are not correct and I'll get to it when I can which may be quite a while. 

Well, I'd better go, so I have to leave at this.  This is an emotional process for me, though.  And it is all the harder now that I see that my family has been dying since the beginning of the blog.  So they were some of the ones that had the front seats to all this, even though they were some of the problems too.  And now I have to deal with my brothers and they think everything is all my fault.  So now I feel very alone and my health just isolates me all the more.  So it's rough.  It would have been able to go through these notes like this a long time ago but you see how much time it's taking and when have I had this much time?  Never.  So realistically I never could have done it until now so it's just a miracle that all the pieces fit together that I even have these articles and I marked them up, because I'm commenting almost solely on the highlighted parts of the articles that I marked up in the 1990s when I copied the articles in Minneapolis.  So at that time I though that this passage that I commented on today was important and here you are today and I still think it is important and I'm commenting on it today and none of the other parts of the article that aren't marked up; I'm not commenting on any of the unmarked up parts of the article.  That's true almost completely on all these articles with very few exceptions.  So these are things that have stuck with me all these years.

454. Discipline & Justice, Pt. 4 (Furby, pt. 1)

This article, or rather book chapter is:

Furby, Lita (1986) Psychology and justice: the study of justice in psychology: historical perspective. In R. L. Cohen, Ed. Justice : Views from the Social Sciences, p. 153-203. N.Y, N.Y.: Plenum Press.

***

I am assuming that justice refers not only to fair treatment but also to respect for the needs and rights inherent in human nature -- an assumption that is shared by some... but not all... (p. 154)

It would seem that the Vienna mission did not really care too much about fair treatment.  That is fairness wasn't an issue that was an issue that came into play in their day to day decision making or management, for example.  It just wasn't an issue they troubled their heads with or concerned themselves about.  Like it was irrelevant to them or something.  So fairness had nothing to do with them and nor should it have anything to do with anyone at the mission either.  I guess that was a given for being part of being there or something.  It wouldn't have been something I would have or probably could have known before I arrive there, however.

As to "respect for the needs and rights inherent in human nature," they would grant the very basic rights, of course, such as a place to live (preferably with a roommate, in my case), proper health care (including fabricated health conditions, such as "culture shock").  So I would never go so far as deny that they weren't concerned with these kinds of things.  I might not appreciate their concern all the time, but nevertheless they did have concern for these things.  But once you get past these sort of surface or mayve even pseudo concern levels, there is a question as to whether the mission and its leadership truly did have respect for my needs and rights inherent in my human nature.  Because if they truly had that respect I don't think they would have treated me the way they did, now would they have?  I don't see how you can say they respected me and at the same time treated me the way they did.  You would have to put your blinders on and totally stick your head in the stand to everything they did to me that whole time I was there.

***

A common criticism of equity theory is that people often use standards other than the contributions rule, especially equality and need.  These three justice standards - equity, equality, and need - are found in much of the empiracle research on justice, although as many as 9 or even 17 different criteria for justice have been delineated (Reis, 1984).

A focus of this research has been to specify when these different standard are employed.  For example, it appears that an equal division of resources is more likely to be considered  just under conditions emphasizing interpersonal harmony and cooperation, whereas a standard of equity is more likely to be adopted when productivity or competition is salient... More generally, the choice of a justice standard seems to depend on (a) the level of intimacy among the individuals involved; (b) the degree of interdependence and cooperation required in obtaining the goods in question; and (c) individual and group difference factors such as social class and gender... (p. 155-156)

This discussion is interesting and since I did have so many problems in Vienna, it is certainly worth considering whether this might account for part of it.  The thing here, though, is that the author is talking about a system-wide phenomena, rather than an individual person's experience.  Certainly individuals would be affected, but I don't think that's really what she's getting at here.

First of all, the mission didn't really dole out the usual sort of rewards in terms of monetary, like raises or bonuses and the like.  So then, we're talking about group recognition, kudos and things like that.  Maybe they'd be entrusted with certain extra sensitive work as a kind of promotion, if you will (in an organization where there was practically no room for advancement.)
 My opinion is that the mission mostly aimed for equity, if anything, among people, so that there would be a good feeling about what they do.  I don't think it ever pretended that anyone was the same, like in equality or as in getting exactly the same privileges, etc.  For one thing, some of these things were really idiosynchratic and you just couldn't expect everything to be exactly the same.

However, the mission also just had complete power and there was a sense too in which you didn't even have the right to expect even any equity, equality or any of that.  So anything you got along those lines might not necessarily have been a given.  At least that's how I felt.

***

How do people develop a concept of justice?

Belief in a Just World

One answer to this question evolved from Lerner's (1980) empirical observations that (North American) adults display a need to believe that people get what they deserve in the world.  He proposes that this "belief in a just world" is rooted in a universal childhood experience... If an individual fulfills certain preconditions, then certain outcomes should be obtained (i.e., are observed.  These expectations also required belief in a stable and consistent environment in which everyone receives what they deserve. (p. 156)

Is this how the Vienna mission viewed me?  Did they believe that I just got what I deserved at their hands? 

***

Well, I'm afraid this article is long enough to divide up in to miltible