We have convictions, values and goals, and in a sense the same applies to our organizations.
In general, convictions specify how things are and how they come about, while values delineate how things should be and goals designate what you and the organization want to attain. In their verbalized forms, convictions and values can act as guidelines for setting goals and for the actions to accomplish these goals. Broadly speaking, the organization’s convictions, values and goals and our own stem from the same pool of social representations (Moscovici, 1984) prevailing in the surrounding societal culture. As long as our personal
convictions, values and goals and the organizational ones are compatible, which usually is the case, they jointly determine and shape our everyday work and relationships.
In some cases, however, the organizational convictions, values and goals and our per- sonal ones may differ, in spite of the fact that they originate from the same pool. This is mostly a matter of the priority of their differential relevance and importance. Still, these differences can be so big that they may amount to contradictions at the behavioral level.
Such a contradiction then interferes with the optimal division of attention that is needed to act in a self-evident way and therefore with the effectiveness of our functioning. Rather simple examples here are the problems of a teetotal bartender and a vegetarian butcher. A more realistic example is somebody doing a completely innocent job for an problematic organization, for example being a concentration camp’s telephone operator.
The fact that both the organization’s and our own convictions, values and goals apply also in the surrounding society implies that we share many deeply rooted ideas about what reality is and should be with the other members of that society. Of course, there may be differences of opinion about some matters, but our everyday life would be impossible unless we all took a lot of common assumptions for granted. For example, we all know and agree about what houses, shops, bars, police stations, offices, schools and churches are, as well as what they are for. Also we understand, and mostly respect, social relationships such as marriage and friendship. Furthermore, we habitually use the rule systems that regulate traffic, everyday conversations, work and all kinds of other transactions, and tend to be quite successful at that.
Apparently, we willingly subscribe to the principles that regulate our everyday life.
If something goes wrong in this respect, we explain our position by articulating these principles (‘I came from the right’, ‘I was here first’, ‘That’s my wife’ and so on) and most of us are quite adept at this. Essentially, these are ethical or moral principles. By explicating these principles, we show that we tacitly assume that they apply to everyone around and also that everyone agrees about them. Most of the time we get an answer that is phrased in terms originating from the same ethical stock, which proves us to be right in those assumptions.
The point here is that all these ethical principles amount to an ethical system that is surprisingly effective in regulating our mutual relationships, at least when we all stick to it. In a sense, we all tacitly know about this ethical system and we have learned to trust it.
When we relate to other people, we expect them to behave according to the common rules that the general system supplies for the different situations in which we meet these people.
For example, we usually don’t expect to be robbed, stabbed or kissed when we enter a shop.
When we have been raised well, we have faith in the reality of this ethical system, which then is part of our more general basic trust.
However, when somebody else acts in a way that we feel to be completely inconsistent with the overall system and we cannot do much about it, the relevance of the whole system suddenly appears to dissolve into nothing. As a result, we don’t know what to expect and find it hard to continue with what we were doing. In essence, this is what incompatibility of convictions and values entails: we fall out of the overall system that is supposed to regulate all our mutual relationships in a known and safe way. To proceed, we have to take it one step at a time, being alert to what might happen. This obviously interferes with the division of attention needed for normal and effective task performance.
Most of the time, we do not experience our convictions, values and goals as such. We usually are only aware of their existence when something happens that makes it difficult or
impossible to use them as guidelines, for example as a result of changes in the organization or our work tasks.
To give some idea of the possible problems resulting from incompatibilities of organi- zational convictions and our own, we mention the following (not fully mutually exclusive) examples of issues that may give rise to such incompatibilities:
Ĺ What the organization is about, its reason for being there, its goals.
Ĺ How the organization should relate to its environment.
Ĺ What the constituent parts of the organization are and how these should relate to each other.
Ĺ What we talk about and attend to in the organization, or simpler: what really exists and what does not exist. This has of course all kinds of implications for what we are able and allowed to do, think and say, and for what we are not.
Ĺ What is good and what is bad in the organization. This is about virtues and sins and their relative importance and priority.
Ĺ How power is divided and exercised in the organization.
Ĺ How the organization sees, values and treats its employees and the relevant categories and criteria here.
Ĺ How the members of the organization are expected to relate to each other.
Ĺ The commitment, effort and productivity that are expected and demanded.
Generally speaking, a good fit of personal and organizational convictions, values and goals on the above issues is an important factor when we talk about the effectiveness of a work environment. A good fit allows us to deal with our work in a self-evident way, without putting question marks against everything that happens and everything we do.
From our individual perspective, a good fit means also that we can to a sufficient degree achieve our personal goals in and by our work. To the degree that such goal attainment is realized, the working task can appropriately captivate our attention, and only then do our task and its environment remain effective. Accomplishing and keeping a good fit is a complicated matter, which is seldom achieved fully and continuously.
The compatibility of personal and organizational convictions, values and goals usually comes about rather organically. First, organizations and potential employees select each other. Then the employees who have been selected are socialized; that is, they learn about and accept the organization’s convictions and values. In the longer run, acceptance turns into identification and the organization’s convictions and values become their own. The people who don’t fit in often go away by themselves or are dismissed (Schneider, 1987), which of course doesn’t exclude all individual problems.
Too Little Compatibility of Convictions, Values and Goals
It has become clear that too little compatibility between our own and the organization’s convictions and values leads to poor effectiveness. The same applies to work in which we cannot sufficiently achieve personal goals. However, there are people who do experience such incompatibility. This can be a matter of a poor selection procedure or a disappointing individual choice. Also there are people for whom it is difficult to realize sufficient com- patibility of convictions, values and goals in almost any organization. This is relevant too
for some people with a different cultural background, as well as for anybody who differs too much from the norm in convictions and values or has non-realistic goals. From the perspective of the organization, many of these people simply disappear from view. Some of them still adapt to a certain degree and stay, under far from optimal circumstances. They remain because they see no other way to make a living, without having many illusions about achieving other personal goals. Often they perform all kinds of tasks that have little meaning to them and, essentially, they are far from effective. Here some descriptions of specific causes of too little compatibility are described.
Organizational Change
Often incompatibility of convictions, values and goals arises when organizations change radically, for example by reorganization, merger, privatization or the appointment of a new manager. Goals such as higher production, more flexibility and being more customer centered can become more prominent, while values such as technical perfection and pro- fessional freedom can lose their dominant role. However, the latter may well have been for us the very reason we chose the organization in question. The organizational change then leaves us with work that has been stripped of a great part of its challenges and meaning.
Though it is easy enough to describe such a development as a matter of personal motivation problems and to deal with it accordingly, it is important to realize that its causes lie in the cultural change. Because changes are especially drastic to people who do their work for a long time in a certain way, we here pay attention to some issues that are important for elderly employees.
The most important problem with many organizational changes, especially for employees over 50, is that many of these changes go against what the organization used to expect of these employees. During their working life, many older employees have effectively learned not to act in the way the organization is now asking from them. Organizations nowadays have to become flatter, as well as more flexible, transparent, less product and more market oriented and so on. The principal consequence is that employees have to become more autonomous, decisive and creative: they have to act as if they were ‘internal entrepreneurs’
who work for themselves and not for an organization owned by other people. To some people – especially some older employees – the formula ‘be free and serve us: make us rich’ seems absurd. Moreover, older employees have often learned, mostly the hard way, to mistrust management intentions. Stories about employability and the disappearance of lifetime employment do not improve things. When a reorganization aiming for example at more autonomy is initiated, strong resistance may be evoked. Apart from the fact that this can hamper the implementation of the reorganization and the effectiveness of the organization, the whole affair is also more likely to be accompanied by all kinds of individual emotional and bodily complaints.
The Changing Perspective of Ageing Employees
The changing perspective of ageing employees implies also a change in their goals at work.
Their new goals then may be incompatible with the organizational ones as perceived by their superiors. On average employees over 50, compared to their younger colleagues, are
less focused on enlarging their income, as they know that it is improbable that their income still will increase substantially. Older employees have developed their own life style attuned to their income and are not strongly motivated on this point. They have realized that they only have a finite amount of time left and focus more on the here and now. As a result, older employees concentrate more on conserving what they have. That is why they also do not like radical reorganizations and the adaptations that those demand from them, the more so as they have gone through a lot of reorganizations already. Moreover, they have little cause to be impressed by the quality of their execution and results.
The Generation Gap
Employees belong to different generations, each characterized by its own value orientation;
that is, the members of the different generations share the same values but prioritize them differently. These different priorities make the members of the different generations look at reality in different ways. The various value orientations and points of view of the different generations are not always compatible. The members of the so-called baby boom generation (born between 1945 and 1960), for example, think on average differently than the generations before and after them about many issues (Schabracq, 2003b). These differences can give rise to disagreements between generations, as well as to mutual prejudice and stereotypes, which can interfere with the effectiveness of work.
Checklist 4.8Too little compatibility of convictions, values and goals
Yes Resistance against:
Ĺ disappearance of craftsmanship . . .
Ĺ increasing lack of interest in technical and professional perfection . . .
Ĺ having to be more autonomous and decisive . . .
Ĺ training . . .
Ĺ reorganizations . . .
Ĺ change of jobs . . .
Ĺ job redesign and changes in tasks . . .
Ĺ older generation’s values . . .
Ĺ younger generation’s values . . .
Ĺ rule violations . . .
Ĺ political games and a ‘political’ climate in general . . .
Ĺ being undervalued . . .
Ĺ rules that are more important than people . . .
Ĺ being thwarted in your objectives . . .
Ĺ not being allowed to use new solutions . . .
Ĺ work that is too much routine . . .
Ĺ work that does not allow for reflection, overview and understanding . . .
Ĺ work that has too few practical implications . . .
Ĺ the way your managers and team leader operate . . .
Ĺ work that is not up to the state of the art . . .
Ĺ intrusions on your position and your department . . .
Ĺ ways of working that go against your ideas about how people should relate to each other.
. . .
Discrepancy Between Espoused Theory and Theory in Use
A last issue of incompatible convictions and values to be mentioned here is usually more problematic to younger employees than to older ones, namely the problems that may arise when the organization is ambiguous about its own convictions and values. This ambiguity mostly is a matter of depicting a much more pleasant image of its own convictions and values – the ‘espoused theory’ – than the convictions and values that determine the actual everyday reality – the ‘theory in use’ (Schon, 1983; see Chapter 1). When newcomers innocently identify with the better image, which can even be the reason they come to work there, they are bound for trouble.
Too Much Compatibility of Values and Goals
Too uninhibited a coincidence of values or too narrow a focus on the achievement of goals negatively affects the effectiveness of the work and the work environment, because it leads to work overload and a lack of recuperation possibilities. This often goes together with the disturbance of the balance between work and life as well.
Giving More than We Get
When we embrace organizational or job values and goals too intensely, we cannot say no to requests that appeal to these values or goals. For example, when we fully identify with the values and goals of nursing or social work, it becomes very difficult to turn down a request for help from a client. Instead, we see responding to the request as our calling and tend to take on more and more. Being unable to say no to our work can also be a matter of liking that work very much and being good at it. Well-known examples are the obsessed romantic artists in their attics, who in spite of hunger, cold, tuberculosis and other miseries only focused on their art, and their modern counterparts, the gray-faced computer nerds, who spend the whole night in front of the screen. As a result, people bite off more than they can chew, even to the extent that they do little else and their effectiveness diminishes.
All these forms of imbalance can be characterized as ‘giving more than we get’, the mirror image of ‘getting more than we give’ or stardom (see earlier in this chapter). Giving more than we get is also a matter of organizational culture. Younger employees, who have not yet learned to develop and guard their own limits, are on average more susceptible to this imbalance than older employees.
In the long run, giving more than we get can even result in burnout (Schaufeli & Buunk, 2003) and all kinds of physical complaints such as ME or chronic fatigue syndrome and RSI (repetitive strain injury). These complaints can be characterized as functional; that is, they incapacitate us so much that they effectively take us out of the situation that caused them. The impersonal, and sometimes even antisocial, demeanor characteristic of burnout can be seen as an awkward form of self-protection against the tendency to give much more than we get.
Checklist 4.9Too much compatibility of values and goals
Yes Working too hard based on:
Ĺ setting no clear limits when it comes to work overload . . . Ĺ finding it unacceptable to say no to requests to do something . . . Ĺ a deeply felt obligation to accomplish a certain goal . . .
Ĺ seeing the work as intrinsically good . . .
Ĺ feeling obliged to meet the highest standards . . .
Ĺ the idea that other people are in much worse circumstances . . .
Ĺ striving for perfection . . .
Ĺ getting recognition . . .
Ĺ wanting to be a model performer . . .
Ĺ wanting to compete and win . . .
Ĺ wanting to be absolutely original . . .
Ĺ wanting to know and understand everything . . .
Ĺ not trusting others sufficiently to delegate tasks to them . . . Ĺ being too eager to engage in new options and tasks . . .
Ĺ proving that one can take on anything . . .
Ĺ doing all kinds of work for everybody . . .
Ĺ wanting to keep the atmosphere sweet at any price . . .