Workplace Issues

[rough outline – needs much work yet]

Management Techniques

Theory X and Y

How to manage creative people

Strengths-Based Development

“Underlying the full-bucket philosophy is the principle of developing employees’ strengths, where they have the most potential for greatness, rather than pushing for improvement in weak areas.”

Modern management textbooks

Leaders in the field [fill in]

Special considerations for programmers

Dynamics of Software Development

Best solutions arrived at by “battle of fully engaged intellects”

***Imaginization*: the work of Gareth Morgan**

“Consistent with my overall orientation, I firmly believe we need to break hold of bureaucratic thinking and move toward newer, less exploitative, more equal modes of interaction in organizations.” (Morgan 1986)

use of metaphors for understanding organizations (e.g. organizations as psychic prisons)

[see his extensive commented bibliography for more resources]

Management Breakdown

Politization

Abraham Zaleznik

“Politization occurs in business when substance takes a back set to process—when people become preoccupied with power as an end in itself rather than with what the power is supposed to accomplish. Perhaps, without realizing what they are doing, managers shift from working on tasks to working on other people. Under the real conditions of power inequality that are characteristics of organizations, this shift tyrannizes subordinates and elicits defensive behavior.”—from “Leading and Managing” in (Kets de Vries 1991)

Abuse

Work of Emily Bassman: Abuse in the Workplace

Human resources manager with AT&T and Pacific Bell

Enlightening chapter: “What does abuse look like?”—should be required reading for anyone who would teach a class on “mutual respect”

Just as with sexual/emotional abuse, the perpetrators are almost always those in a position to control resources (i.e. management)

· This fact seems to get lost—indeed, inverted-- in the standard “mutual respect refresher” sessions

· Any challenger to managerial abuse viewed as case of “difficult employee”

· Compare with ’The Difficult Professor’, a Pernicious Concept, by Ken Westhues

http://mueller.educ.ucalgary.ca/Difficult/default.html

Much more to list here…

· Lack of Discretionary Effort

· “Many managers appear to think that employees owe their bosses discretionary effort. They judge harshly any employee who does not exert it. This is just another form of abuse. It is a manager’s responsibility to create the environment that will elicit discretionary effort from employees, not to blame employees if they choose not to exercise it.” [p. 147] This classification of abuse would almost certainly then also apply to a manager demanding a precise accounting of the amount of discretionary effort expended by employees who contribute it, as such a demand would imply expectations even beyond the discretionary effort itself.

· “Managers who create an empowering environment will receive not only discretionary effort but also levels of performance consistently beyond their expectations.” [p. 147]

· Loss of Creativity

· “Employee abuse creates fear and anxiety, which are incompatible with creativity. The same stressful conditions that have led to an increase in employee abuse also serve to stifle creativity. Certain conditions are necessary for creativity to flourish, one of which is time to play with ideas while in an open mode of thinking: relaxed, expansive, less-purposeful, more contemplative (Cleese 1991). Organizationally, this translates into administrative slack.” [p. 149; italics mine]

· Administrative slack

· (see above)

· Performance reviews

· Bassman: “A system of performance appraisal creates the appropriate environment for individual abuse by providing managers with opportunities to practice management by fear. Its existence is also an example of institutional abuse, because it contributes to a culture based on management by threat and intimidation.” [page 173] See also: (Deming 1982)

· “360 degree”: see Foucault’s discussion of panopticism in Discipline and Punish

· Contrast with feedback on an ongoing basis in normal daily interactions, not in a formal sense, but by way of what Martin Buber calls "reciprocity".

· The problem with both praise and criticism is that they can be, in conjunction with each other, instruments of psychological abuse:

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/hr/ohs/occstress/psychabuse/tracking.html

· Robyn Mann: abusers "use praise reward as part of the degenerating process".

· W. Edwards Deming: leads to “management by fear”: (Deming 1986)

· W. Edwards Deming on Performance Reviews.doc [extensive quotation, linked document]

· Steve Maguire: “Personnel reviews, as I’ve seen them done, are almost totally worthless as a tool to promote employee growth.” (Maguire 1994) p. 122

· Isolation

· More…

Mobbing Syndrome

From: Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace (Davenport, Schwartz et al. 2002)

· Definition:

· ‘The mobbing syndrome is a malicious attempt to force a person out of the workplace through unjustified accusations, humiliation, general harassment, emotional abuse, and/or terror. It is a "ganging up" by the leader(s)—organization, superior, co-worker, or subordinate—who rallies others into systematic and frequent "mob-like" behavior. Because the organization ignores, condones or even instigates the behavior, it can be said that the victim, seemingly helpless against the powerful and many, is indeed "mobbed." The result is always injury—physical or mental distress or illness and social misery and, most often, expulsion from the workplace.’ (p. 40)

· [much more here to add; get permission from Gail]

“euphoria of collective attack” http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/ohs-canada.htm

·

Ethics and Abuse of Power

Sissela Bok

· Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life(Bok 1979)

· Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation(Bok 1984)

· Read both in entirety: rich, dense, fruitful, definitive

Costs of Deception and Abuse

See Bassman, Bok for extensive list

Psychological Injury

· Mobbing syndrome (Davenport, Schwartz et al. 2002)

· Larry Hirschorn: system of psychological injuries in the workplace (Hirschhorn 1988)

· Psychological exhaustion from need to control anger and outrage before it could lead to further retribution and mobbing situations

· See chapter 4, “Behavior in Extreme Situations: Coercion” in (Bettelheim 1960)

· Identity, self-worth, emotional well-being:

· “a person’s employment is an essential component of his or her sense of identity, self-worth, and emotional well-being. Accordingly, any change in a person’s employment status is bound to have far-reaching repercussions. The point at which the employment relationship ruptures is the time when the employee is most vulnerable, and hence most in need of protection. When termination is accompanied by acts of bad faith in the manner of discharge, the results can be especially devastating.”

· other references/corollaries to this phenomenon:

· 2003 Film: Mystic River

Tim Robbins role for which he won best actor at the Academy Awards

· Film: The Crucible

· Workplace bullying:

Widely considered to be the greatest short story of all time:

Melville’s Billy Budd

· [other books from my personal library]

· Shakespeare:

“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Othello", Act 3 scene 3 [Acknowledgement to Gail Pursell Elliott for applying this quote to workplace mobbing]

· Bible (King James):

“But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn…” Psalm 22:6-7

“They also that seek after my life lay snares for me; and they that seek my hurt speak mischievous things, and imagine deceits all day long.” Psalm 38:12

“For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I could have hid myself from him: But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and my acquaintance.” Psalm 55:12-13

Exclusion and Isolation

· “There seems to be a need inside all groups, including socially excluded groups, to recreate a hierarchy, creating a process of inclusion/exclusion within the group. There needs to be an external enemy for this not to happen.“

· http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~opusuk/socexclu.htm

William L. White: Professional distress

· "It is only proper that I should conclude by examining how to respond effectively to the victims of professional distress, for it was precisely the concern over such casualties that compelled the studies and consultation work that served as the foundation for this book. In the process of conducting those early studies, I had the very disquieting experience of listening for many hours to workers who were caught up in the incestuous dynamics and role conditions I've described here. I interviewed workers whose health self-destructed from sheer physical exhaustion, workers whose marriages were only memories, workers who fell victim to the self-medicating effects of alcohol and other drugs, and workers who fell apart emotionally. Nearly all of these individuals either left or were extruded from their work settings under conditions of extreme emotional pain. Many continued to struggle years later for emotional closure on their work experiences. They continued to seek some rational understanding of what happened to them and others in their organizations. Many of those leaving health and human services agencies received less respect, concern, and support than would have been extended to any client seeking services in the agencies in which they had worked. Such exiting workers often became the pariahs and untouchables of our field, and those of us who remained continued in our blindness or arrogance to see ourselves as immune, believing that what happened to them could not happen to us. If there is any message that collectively emerges from the stories of distressed workers, it is that we are all potential victims of these processes. Today's respected worker may be tomorrow's untouchable.” (White 1997), p. 297

· “I conclude with my ongoing belief that we will address the issue of professional distress when we begin to define it as a breakdown in the relationships between organizations and workers and stop defining it solely by the personalities of our casualties." (Ibid.)

·

Organizational Totalitarianism

Organizational Psychodynamics

The snakepit: work of Howard Schwartz and others

· Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay(Schwartz 1990)

· Theory of the Organizational Ideal

· Explanation of process of organizational totalitarianism

· Transposition of work and ritual

· Self-deception and the narcissistic loss of reality

· Concentration of narcissistic loss of reality up the organizational hierarchy

Tie in with “workplace mobbing”

· Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace(Davenport, Schwartz et al. 2002)

Costs of exclusion, isolation

· Erving Goffman, Stigma

· [other references here, find them]

Other examples

Catholic Church (as well as other religious organizations)

· Forgiveness of major sin

· even serial killers forgiven if they recognize church authority

· Unforgiveness and excommunication

· implies eternal damnation

· no hope of redemption

· only imposed on those who were seen to challenge church authority

Bruno Bettelheim (Bettelheim 1960)

· Discussion of elimination of individuality in concentration camps

o Management of reality itself

o Costs of telling the truth about what one has witnessed

o Concentration camps are gone, but the dangers of such social control is still present, though more subtle

o Keys to survival of the self were to:

1. hold on to at least a small part of one’s individuality

2. have a point beyond which one would not allow oneself be further degraded

·

Freedom of Hegel

Acceptance of existing power structures, even when unjust

Immature concept of freedom

· Dismissive of humanistic ethics

· Whatever happens is will of God

· Those in positions of power are thus divinely-ordained agents of God

Justification for abuse, human rights violations

Self Under Siege

Lecture series by Professor Rick Roderick

Reciprocal Human Relationships

Modern conceptions of freedom

Freedom of John Stuart Mill

20^th century philosophers:

· Emma Goldman

· “The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.”

· Hannah Arendt

· Wrote “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, the original and most influential book on the subject

· Ghandi

· Gandhi's Swaraj included spiritual freedom, which meant liberation from "illusion and ignorance" .

· Martin Luther King

· “When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life…”

· Malcom X

" You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom." [find a better quote and check the context to make sure it was made at a point in his life when he did not advocate violence as a means]

· Marcuse

· Marcuse argued that the current organization of society produced "surplus repression" by imposing socially unnecessary labor

· Costs of modernity

Rationality has a dark side

That which appears to be rational in isolation can be irrational on a larger scale: look at outcome

Greater fear, not lesser

[develop this]

· Dispute with Fromm [investigate]

· vision of liberation -- of the full development of the individual in a non-repressive society

· Habermas

· in modern society human beings lack freedom (major focus of his work)

· communication free from domination as a regulative principle

· Foucault

· “The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”

· Derida

Within institutions of higher learning there should exist “an unconditional freedom to question and assert, or even the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth”

· Baudrillard

For members of the Frankfurt school, including Baudrillard, "reification — the process whereby human beings become dominated by things and become more thinglike themselves — comes to govern social life. Conditions of labor imposed submission and standardization on human life, as well as exploiting workers and alienating them from a life of freedom and self-determination."

"In a sense, Baudrillard's work can be read as an account of a further stage of reification and social domination than that described by the Frankfurt School who described how individuals were controlled by ruling institutions and modes of thought."

--Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

· Judith Butler

Presenting us with a more sophisticated understanding at the end of the 20th century, Butler ties together Freud and Foucault [stopping at Hegel, Nietzsche, Althusser, et. al. along the way... try to find time to read and absorb this material]

"Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially. The self-colonizing trajectory of certain of certain forms of identity politics are symptomatic of this paradoxical embrace of the injurious term. As a further paradox, then, only by occupying--being occupied by--that injurious term can I resist and oppose it, recasting the power that constitutes me as the power I oppose." --The Psychic Life of Power, p. 104

Judith Butler is currently Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland

Reciprocity

Martin Buber

· I and Thou (Buber 1958)

Ken Westhues

Objectification

Dr. Alan Duncan

Psychology of these viewpoints and related:

Psychoanalysis of organizations

Erich Fromm: “group narcissism”

Mayo’s own Dr. Alan Duncan: “institutional narcissism”

[I pointed out the parallel to Dr. Duncan between his term and that of Fromm's, who he had not yet read]

Work of Scandinavian psychologist Heinz Laymann

http://www.leymann.se/English/frame.html

Asperger’s Syndrome

Autism spectrum disorder

Characterized by impairment of empathy and reciprocity

On a scale that shades into normal

Correlation with “engineering types” [find references]

Lack of reciprocity (see Buber, above)

Show a connection between how lack of empathy at a group level (as in mobbing) mirrors that at an individual level. Individual absence of reciprocity as it relates to unhealthy patterns of organizational behavior—in each case a partial withdrawal from consensual reality is observed.

Consensual reality vs. delusion, individual and organizational psychopathology

“Neurosis does not disavow the reality, it only ignores it; psychosis disavows it and tries to replace it,” Freud remarked. What is substituted, according to Glass, is delusion. (Glass 1995)

Narcissistic loss of reality in organizations (Schwartz 1990:86)

What you can have at an organizational level is “consensual delusion”.

Translate from Fromm's notion of "socially-patterned defect" to "organizationally-patterned defect"

"The cues rerouting herd perception come in many forms. Sociologists REALITY IS A SHARED HALLUCINATION, by Howard Bloom

Distinction between psychological illness and psychological injury (Westhues, et. al.)

Bibliography

Bassman, E. S. (1992). Abuse in the workplace : management remedies and bottom line impact. Westport, Conn., Quorum.

Bettelheim, B. (1960). The informed heart; autonomy in a mass age. Glencoe, Ill.,, Free Press.

Bok, S. (1979). Lying : moral choice in public and private life. New York, Vintage Books.

Bok, S. (1984). Secrets : on the ethics of concealment and revelation. New York, Oxford University Press.

Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou. New York,, Scribner.

Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power : theories in subjection. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.

Davenport, N., R. D. Schwartz, et al. (2002). Mobbing : emotional abuse in the American workplace. Ames, Iowa, Civil Society Pub.

Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the crisis. Cambridge, Mass., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison. New York, Pantheon Books.

Glass, J. M. (1995). Psychosis and power : threats to democracy in the self and the group. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma; notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,, Prentice-Hall.

Hirschhorn, L. (1988). The workplace within : psychodynamics of organizational life. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (1991). Organizations on the couch : clinical perspectives on organizational behavior and change. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Maguire, S. (1994). Debugging the development process : practical strategies for staying focused, hitting ship dates, and building solid teams. Redmond, Wash., Microsoft Press.