The issue for me arises when I work with people who say things like, "The
Bank is mean and petty", "The company has decided to take away our shift
allowance", "This organisation just doesn't care about us". It seems to
me that it's then very difficult to locate responsibility in individuals
for making decisions (e.g. the CEO who decided ...., the Shift Supervisor
who decided ...) and consequently difficult to debate and discuss why
things happen in the way that they do with the actual people who have
taken the decisions.
On a slightly different tack, Howard Schwartz has written a piece on how,
sometimes, we invest institutions with a life, and diminish our individual
voices, as a way of giving ourselves permission to do things in the name
of the institution which we would find uncomfortable doing as independent
individuals. Apologies to Howard for any distortion in this gross
simplification. (Ref is Howard Schwartz, "Anti-social actions of
committeed organisational participants", Organization Studies, vol 8,
1987, pp. 327-340.)
regards
Peter Fullerton
--Peter Fullerton <peterxyz@ozemail.com.au>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>