Why Distancing Yourself from Your Organization Can Be Important for Its Survival
In order to get an idea of the level of motivation in their organization, the top management needs to find out just how much cynicism exists in it. How, for instance, do employees react when asked to explain the mission statement of their organization? Do they make a serious attempt to show how the various values should be understood, or do they simply present them with a smirk on their face? Is a change project initiated by the top management met with genuine interest or with a sarcastic remark such as ‘ah, yet another of those very useful programmes’?
The problem is that the leadership of an organization often has no sense at all of the real degree of internal cynicism. The management of a supermarket chain does not even notice that the organization’s core value of being ‘customer-oriented’, which was established through a participatory process, is at best received with humour in the staff backroom because everyone knows very well that this orientation towards the customer is imposed by video surveillance and ‘mystery shoppers’ sent in by the headquarters. The supervisory board does not realize that the ‘fancy dress day’ on which all staff are expected to turn up in some extravagant outfit is seen as ‘cheesy’ and that the resentment against the imposed ‘fun’ alienates staff even further. The results of quantitative questionnaires are trusted and fail to convey how cynical staff have actually become.
Cynicism is the reverse side of an employee’s identification with the activity performed in the organization. A member of the foreign legion is immune to cynicism because it is clear that orders are followed for no other reason but money. Someone who identifies with an organization, by contrast, reacts with bitterness if some idealistic ideas about it are disappointed.
Cynicism arises when the discrepancy between noble principles and perceived reality becomes too large. This also explains why spitefulness develops in particular in organizations that bank on a high degree of identification among their staff, for instance development aid organizations, schools, and hospitals. These organizations face the problem that they can control the formation of idealism only to a limited extent because the training of their staff often took place outside of the organization. After their training, teachers are hit by reality when pupils do not behave in the way the teachers were told they would at university. Medical doctors are trained at universities for the job they idolize, and then discover that it is difficult to balance their focus on patients’ well-being with the economic pressures at hospitals.
Cynicism enables employees to continue working as a member of their organization during difficult times. The impression is given that the job cannot simply be left. Leaving a development aid organization after 15 or 20 years is not an easy thing to do because another suitable workplace is hard to find. A teacher’s status as civil servant is not something to be relinquished on a whim, even if one is suffering. The young intern at a hospital tries to survive their time there in the hope that something better will follow. In such contexts, cynicism performs an important psychosocial function.
However, the effects caused by cynicism in organizations can also be devastating. Employees not only write the place off in their private thoughts, but also use every opportunity to air their grievances. Their sarcasm dominates coffee break conversations, provides the commentary in the background of large management conferences, and often becomes the dominant position in the opinions that circulate backstage.
Management sees cynicism mainly as a problem of the employees. But this view overlooks the fact that cynicism in many cases is home-grown by organizations which, over decades, were more or less free of it, but then – under the heading ‘we are a purpose-driven organization’ – embarked on a soul-searching mission with such zeal that cynicism became unavoidable. Instead of complaining about employees’ cynicism and trying to remove them from the system, it would make much more sense to take the symptom of spitefulness as an indication that management should cut down on their excessive expectations concerning the employees’ identification with the organization.
