Not for quotation or distribution without the consent of the author.

Introduction

What was it like?

I went to Yale in the Fall of 1963 -- I preceded Ed Lawler there. My first mentor was Chris Argyris. Of course I only knew his work from his writings especially Understanding Organizational Behavior which was an early systemic model of human behavior in organizations. By the time I got to Yale, the Chris Argyris of Understanding Organizational Behavior was no longer there; there was the Chris Argyris of T-groups, espoused theory and theory-in-practice -- all a very strange and heady brew for a positivist from the hard headed Manchester School. That first class of Ph.D. students on the behavioral side had six members: Pete Harkins, who dropped out to become a University Administrator in California (we have lost touch), Al Wolfson who went to work for IBM, another positivist like myself, Roger Simon who had come from Carnegie and who is now in Toronto at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He has become an ethnographer in his middle age. And two names that need no further comment: Clay Alderfer and Lee Bolman who have both gone on to bigger and better things.

Ed arrived a year later -- I remember with awe people saying, wow this guy is just arriving and he already has two publications in Personnel Psych -- today that may get an ABD to the job interview at a good school. He became a member of my committee and after a few months I realized that he and I had similar ways at looking at the world so I asked him to be my advisor. I think that the first thing he did was to go and ask Chris whether that was alright -- my first lesson: for all the seeming egalitarianism, faculties are power structures and you better know where the power lies. Chris, of course, was glad to turn over the reins of guidance to Ed who worked with me extensively in defining, refining, and reshaping my dissertation proposal. I can't say that there was a defining moment of learning: I think what I absorbed was the patient working and reworking of the research to gain a refined document. All this was done at a very high energy level: publish and perish not was the goal for that new batch of assistant professors at Yale (Ed, Richard Hackman, Fritz Steele, and later Ben Schneider and Tim Hall).

Actually I made up that bit about the proposal -- I didn't submit a proposal until three months before I defended my dissertation -- students at Toronto would never get away with that. But seriously, Ed did work a lot with me to get a manageable dissertation topic out of the welter of ideas that were buzzing through my head.

Maybe there was a defining occasion, one that involved both my mentor and his mentor. That took place in a New York hotel room with Ed and Port. Ed and I had come back from central Pennsylvania where we -- mainly he -- had convinced a firm to cooperate as a research site for my dissertation. I spent an evening observing while they struggled with drafting a couple of chapters of the book that became Managerial Attitudes and Performance. That's the closest I have got to writing a book! But the lesson was work, work, work -- all the time. I guess I decided then that I didn't have the energy to work THAT hard! And one other thing that I did learn and accept was the need to draft, read, let sit fallow, reread, rewrite, revise, again and again. When I complained to Ed that he wasn't letting me share a draft with the rest of the committee, he said "But it's not ready to show to Chris and Vern Buck yet" And he was right -- thank you Ed!

I think that one of the norms at Yale was: every tub on its own bottom. Each individual doctoral student was expected to develop his² own program of research. That kind of autonomy was strongly valued, so the "industrial model" in which a professor and a stream of students work on the Professor's agenda did not prevail. There are advantages to both models. In the former one gets a diverse group of students, the student gets early experience in struggling with problem definition but you don't get the very close association of working with an expert to see how he/she develops ideas and the nitty gritty detail that translates those ideas into action -- to say nothing of a set of articles with your name on -- albeit in junior position on the masthead (which can be very useful in the job market these days).

Changes: What have we gained, what have we lost?

Gains

1. Incredible precision in our models and methods of measurement and analysis:
   • IRT
   • CFA
   • SEM
2. Some convergence of motivational models around goal setting/attribution theory/self-efficacy.
3. Incredible refinement of the conceptual space:
   • satisfaction -- a multifaceted concept
   • commitment -- how many kinds of commitment are there?

Losses

1. Some may argue that #3 above is in fact a loss
2. The further separation of the qualitative and the quantitative perspectives. Perhaps it is not a further separation -- perhaps it is the strengthening of the qualitative approach so it has its own life; but it has been accompanied by a specialization so that those of us on the quantitative side don't do much in the way of qualitative prework in our research. We should as it helps prevent the next loss.
3. Loss of contextualization. ³ We do not think much about the organizational contexts or economic contexts in which our work is done. There are a few honorable exceptions:
   • Graen's (Cashman, et al., 1976; Graen, et al 1979) studies of the subordinates of "hired hands" and cadre members
   • Ancona's (Ancona & Caldwell, 1992) exploration of group context
   • Larry James and his colleagues (1992) argue compellingly that variation in individual (and presumably organizational) performance and covariation with other variables is much more likely when organizations have what they call a non-restrictive climate (which is characterized by: high confidence in employees, valuing achievement, desiring employees to reach potential, decentralized decision-making, low standardization of work procedures, merit-based reward systems, innovative approaches to problem solving) than when the organization has a highly restrictive climate (characterized by the opposite conditions).
   • Hulin, Roznowski, and Hachiya's (1985) analysis of turnover studies. They argued that different economic conditions would attract new employees with different levels of attachment.
   • These contexts are important and deserve much more attention in our work. Accordingly we need breadth as well as depth in our programs -- and that's the lesson for program designers.

Now for the recurring puzzle.

A few years ago at SIOP a bunch of scholars (organized by Ann Howard with impresario Doug Bray) impersonated the great theorists of the past and present who had dealt with Employee Empowerment. The burden of each of these was to show the strength and age of the ideas of what we call today "High Commitment Workplaces."

They range from the 1920's through the 1990's and include:

1. 1920's Mary Parker Follett's law of the situation
2. 1950's Rensis Likert's Human Relations and Human Resources
   • MacGregor: Theory X and Theory Y
   • Argyris: Understanding Organizational Behavior
3. Herzberg's Motivators and Hygienes
4. Eric Trist's Socio-Technical systems
   • Autonomous work groups
   • The quality of Working life Movement
     • Actually there was some disagreement in the Tavistock School: Rice was much opposed to empowerment for empowerment's sake.
5. Bill Byham's High commitment work organizations
   • Who is committed: the employees
   • Who is not committed: the employer
     • Downsizing, rightsizing, etc.

The question that I have about all of this is: why do we have these waves? Why aren't we building on the past with improved systems, rather than reinventing the wheel?

It seems to me that these cycles of focus on high involvement systems closely parallel the business cycle reflected in the kind of economy and labor market we have. In recession and depression, high commitment is viewed by managers as an unnecessary luxury. In times of tight labor markets, these practices are essential to attract a high quality workforce. For the past three years, I have been perusing the job advertisements in the Boston Globe. Two years ago, ads -- especially for high tech firms -- were full of the requirements that applicants had to have before they would be considered for employment: five years of experience, Knowledge of C++, Perl, Java computer languages, several degrees. Today the emphasis is on the benefits the company can provide, with little about the required qualifications of the worker.

But my question is why this change. We, or many of us, are convinced that the principles of socio-technical systems with employee control over the variances is the touchstone of effective work design. Yet after seventy years, we have not convinced managers of this. These ideas only become fashionable in tight labor markets. When the reserve army of labor is large, these ideas are abandoned. I am adopting here Barley & Kunda's (1992) view of economic determinism (see Eastman & Bailey (1998) for an alternative perspective).

I do not know why. This to me is the major puzzle. Is it a reflection of our failure as teachers to socialize a group of mangers who have adopted these values. I think it is a challenge for the future generations -- though I still have a few more years before I become a grand old man.

Let me be a little speculative for a few moments to at least identify an approach that may be useful in explaining this phenomenon: evolutionary psychology

My suspicion is that the new theories developed from evolutionary psychology may be informative about this reversion to hierarchal control in times of crisis. Evolutionary psychology may have much to tell us about the modules of the mind that guide our thoughts in the present time.

1. It is suggested that we have built in "cheater detectors"
   • interesting implications for performance appraisal and for the persistence of joint ventures.
2. That men and women evolved differently in their spatial recognition skills
   • men successful at rotational invariance
     • good for hunting and escaping predators while on the hunt
     • good in today's jobs if you are a truck driver, pilot, builder
   • women successful at recognition of objects on flat surfaces
     • good for gathering herbs, fruits and vegetables
     • good in today's jobs for astronomers, radar scope viewers, inspectors of microchips, etc.
3. Perhaps we have built in systems that order us into hierarchies so that to escape this natural tendency we have to build in deliberative procedures to avoid regression to the hierarchical form. Just as my other great mentor Bob House used to say of Norman Maier: "Now Norman let's problem solve this", at which the normally combatative Maier would switch out of a competitive mode into a problem solving mode.

Comments about mentoring.

I would describe myself as a "supportive bastard". The proteges might omit that first word.

On the supportive side, my presumption is that a project, on which a student or a junior faculty member has done some work, will have a useful core to it . My job is to identify that core and help the student develop a testable set of propositions based on those core ideas. That is where being a bastard comes in.

I insist that the student produces a proposal document that provides a seamless logical chain from the general ideas to the literature review to the operationalizations to the sample selection to the analytic procedures. If I challenged a student about a skip in the logic the student often couldn't make the linkage; thus an extra section in the proposal was born. On the rare occasion, the student would have a ready answer, in those cases I insisted that this should appear in a chapter of the dissertation. This leads to long proposals and even longer dissertations.

Thus I work with students to assure that continuity of linkage. They hate it, but it shows in the final product.

I think that the reason that I am so good at spotting the logical gaps is because I have such a bad memory.

As a result of this bad memory, I can't fill in the gaps by drawing on my memory of the literature. So the gaps jump out at me and I force the students to explicate every link in their logical chain of reasoning.

I also subscribe to Koestler's theory of creativity: bring two different frames together and you will get some new and interesting ideas: so Gary Latham and Glen Whyte and I, who teach the doctoral seminars at Toronto, continually emphasize to the students: take what you get in one class and try to integrate it with ideas you get in another.

Finally I guess that I try to get students to work on interesting theoretical ideas rather than on practical problems; but would love them to do both. There is plenty of time to address practical problems after graduation.

Bill Cooper didn't need this type of mentoring. He knew what he wanted to do, could articulate it clearly. He was the kind of student for whom the only role for the mentor is to get out of the way and let him get on with things. That then is enough from me -- on to the next generation. As you can see from the genetic similarities [Bill was wearing an eye patch], Bill isn't really my student: he is Bob House's! But we worked very closely together all those years ago.

References

Ancona, D. G.,& Caldwell, D. F. (1992). Bridging the boundary: External activity and performance in organizational teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37, 634-665.

Barley, S. R., & Kunda, G. (1992). Design and devotion: Surges of rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37, 363-399.

Cashman, J., Dansereau, F., Graen, G., Haga, W., J. (1976). Organizational understructure and leadership: A longitudinal investigation of the managerial rolemaking process. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 15, 278-296.

Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for Social Exchange. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.). The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Graen, G., Cashman, J. F., Ginsberg, S., & Schiemann, W. (1979). Effects of linking-pin quality on the quality of working life of lower participants. Administrative Science Quarterly, 22, 491-504.

Eastman, W., & Bailey, J. R. (1998). Mediating the fact-value antinomy: Patterns of managerial and legal rhetoric, 1890-1990. Organizational Science, 9, 232-245.

James, L. R., Demaree, R. G., Mulaik, S. A., & Ladd, R. T. (1992). Validity generalization in the context of situational models. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77, 3-14.

Hulin, C. L., Roznowski, M., & Hachiya, D. (1985). Alternative opportunities and withdrawal decisions: Empirical and theoretical discrepancies and an integration. Psychological Bulletin, 97, 233-250.

Silverman, I. & Eals, M. (1992). Spatial sex differences: Evolutionary theory and data. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (Eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (pp. 487-503). New York: Oxford. University Press.
.