Some managers believe that their organizations consist exclusively of the people working within them. In speeches delivered to their employees at training courses and in glossy brochures, senior managers therefore often demand that the employees should bring their whole personality to bear on their work at the organization. But what would actually happen if they obliged?
When Organizations Forget Their Own Interests
Businesses, public administrations, and professional associations are characterized by the fact that they abstract from the individual interests of their members. In short, organizations can only exist because they have developed mechanisms for disciplining the many different individual interests with which they find themselves confronted. By signing an employment contract, a new employee agrees to bracket her personal preferences and to put the organization’s expectations with regard to the role she should play in their place. First and foremost, she will accept the rules of the system. Thus, the existence of organizations depends on employees’ willingness to shed a large part of their hopes, problems, and expectations upon entering the building, and precisely not to bring their whole personality to bear on the organization.
Sociologists call the trick that is operative at this point ‘conditional membership’. Membership in a business, public administration, or university is tied to the acceptance of certain expectations which the organization has with regard to its members’ behaviour. When a member, for reasons of principle does not accept an instruction he is given by a superior or refuses to accept a particular rule as a matter of principle, he rebels not only against this particular instruction or rule but against the fundamental principles of the organization.
This observation allows us to identify the crucial difference between businesses, public administrations, and hospitals on the one hand and groups of friends on the other. In the case of friends it is legitimate to demand that the whole personality of an individual, including her personal, professional, skills-related, religious, or sports-related hopes and worries, can, and should, be brought to bear on the group. The members of the group meet and enjoy each other’s company because of their personalities. The purpose of communication is mainly to build relationships, and need not be related to a concrete task.
Organizations, however, are not about finding interesting, nice, and likeable people; their aim is to integrate activities and information in such a way that solutions for the tasks at hand can be found. These tasks can include the development of a new model of car, the production of a writing desk, or the winning of a contract for a large building project. Meeting interesting, nice, and likeable people is not excluded as a possibility, but it is easy to imagine what would happen if an employee prioritized his interests in human relationships over the development of the car, the production of the desk, or the winning of the contract.
There may be ideological reasons for the reintroduction of the ‘human’ element into organizational politics, but it can only ever be a very limited reintroduction, for this element is, in general, excluded. Office parties, enlightened mission statements, or communication skills training are ultimately attempts at re-admitting, in small and easy-to-control doses, the ‘human’ element which is, really, not allowed in. What happens, then, when an organization adopts the catchphrase ‘let’s focus on our employees’, and seeks to integrate employees and their individual interests more fully into the organization?
The focus on employees relaxes the ‘disciplining’ mechanisms that apply to individuals and their interests; the existing regulations are watered down, so to speak. The positions, roles, and rules that organizations have taken such great pains to create are thus called into question. The demand that employees bring their whole personality to bear on the organization is ultimately the demand that employees bring all their ideas, needs, and views to the organization, without the organization exercising any censorship of them. This may well have an invigorating effect – the mobilization of individual interests, preferences, and interesting alternatives encourages diversity. It prevents the roles and rules of the system from becoming rigid and thus contributes to the success of an organization. It can certainly be an advantage if not all employees live and breathe their business but rather keep irritating it with their deviant behaviour, pet ideas, and eccentricities.
But despite all these seeming advantages, we should not forget that the mobilization of ideas, needs, and views always potentially undermines the mechanism by which an organization distinguishes itself from its employees. Organizations which concentrate (too) intensely on the needs and views of their employees lose their cohesion. They become a mass of uncoordinated decisions. They risk devolving (or evolving – depending on how you see it) into a group of friends.
Organizations therefore face a fundamental problem. They need to ignore personal interests and wishes, but they also need to incorporate these interests and wishes, because otherwise they will not be able to find employees. The management is stuck in a dilemma that Cornelius Castoriadis has described as follows: on the one hand, an organization has to draw on its employees’ whole personalities, as only then will formal rules and roles not become rigid; on the other hand, an organization needs to ignore part of the local and particular interests, because otherwise its fundamental principles, as expressed in formal rules and roles, cannot be upheld.
