If this transformation process occurs, group members will tend to forget that originally they were not sure and that the proposed course of action was at an earlier time just a proposal to be debated and confronted.” (Schein, 2010).
• Basic Assumptions: “When a belief or value is repeated and
is repeated successfully time and again, it become established or entrenched. Once it is entrenched it is taken for granted and one will find little variance from this in the groups where it have been working. “If a basic assumption comes to be strongly held in a group, members will find behaviour based on any other premise inconceivable. For example, in an occupation such as engineering, it is inconceivable to deliberately design something that is unsafe; it is a taken-for-granted assumption that things should be safe. Basic assumptions tend to be non confrontable and non debatable, and hence are extremely difficult to change. To learn something new in the basic assumptions realm requires us to resurrect, re-examine, and possibly change some of the more stable portions of our cognitive structure. Such learning is intrinsically difficult because the re-examination of basic assumptions temporarily destabilizes our cognitive and interpersonal world, releasing large quantities of basic anxiety. Rather than tolerating such anxiety levels, we tend to want to perceive the events around us as congruent with our assumptions, even if that means distorting, denying, projecting, or in other ways falsifying to ourselves what may be going on around us.” (Schein, 2010).
Culture at its lowest level, i.e. basic assumptions, is an integrated part of our personality. As psychologists we refer to it as characteristic adaptations, these include motives, goals, plans, strivings, strategies, values, virtues, schemas, self- images, mental representations of significant others, developmental tasks, and many other aspects of human individuality that speak to motivational, social– cognitive, and developmental concerns.
Many approaches to defining personality explicitly or implicitly invoke a domain of
92 Management Today | January 2012
human individuality that is more closely linked to motivation and cognition than are traits. It seems to be more open to environmental and cultural influences, specifying features of human individuality that are more likely to change over time than traits do. This may also be more implicated in situationally anchored personality processes and everyday personality dynamics than traits are (McAdams, 2006).
4.2 Understanding the Drivers of Human Behaviour
Human behaviour is guided by four basic emotional needs, or drives, that are the product of our common evolutionary heritage. This is described by Lawrence and Nohria in their 2002 book Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, they are the drives: • to acquire (obtain scarce goods, including intangibles such as social status); • bond (form connections with individuals
and groups); • comprehend (satisfy our curiosity and master the world around us); and • defend (protect against external threats and promote justice).
The above underpins the basis of the human behaviour and underlies everything we do. This article will not deal with all four emotional needs or drives, but will focus on the second need of bonding or to form connections with individuals or groups (Nohria, Groysberg, & Lee, 2008).
The drive to bond.
Most animals bond with their parents, family, or tribe, but only humans extend that connection to larger collectives such as organisations, associations, and nations. The drive to bond, when met, is associated with strong positive emotions like love and caring and, when not met, with negative ones like loneliness and anomie (a feeling of disorientation and alienation from society caused by the perceived absence of a supporting social or moral framework). At work, the drive to bond accounts for the boost in motivation when employees feel proud of belonging to an organisation and for their loss of morale when the institution betrays them.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114