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initiatives in developing and implementing solutions to organisational goal barriers, with appraisal being based on the success with which they carry their projects through.

The paradoxical possibility that if attitudes are consistent and predictive because they reflect predispositions, then it will be very hard to change them, is seldom exercised to any great degree in the management literature which makes so much of attitudinal research. The likelihood is, however, that attitudes are much more variable than is often assumed, and that even if changing core values is difficult, the changing of more operational attitudes and more particularly the generation of new attitudes can be controlled by the use of agenda-setting devices, including attitude, morale and opinion surveys.

Hollway (1991: 90–1 and 146–50) cites various examples which indicate that the interpretation and use of surveys has, since their inception in the 1930s, often been more of a public relations than a human relations exercise, and that they ‘could be used to produce a self-fulfilling prophecy effect’ (1991: 91). Rather than surveying and analysing individual and cultural diversity, they are largely tools of cultural conformity. Referring back to the earlier notion that norms and habits affect the translation of attitudes into behaviour, we might suppose that the best strategy for changing attitudes is to embed them in self-enacting scripts which people are forced to internalise as a necessary part of their social and organisational functioning.

The usage of attitudinal measures in the workplace can be more readily understood with reference to the focus that Zimbardo et al. note in looking at attitude change from the perspective of populations rather than individuals:

Even though we cannot predict the behaviour of single individuals, we should be able to predict that people (in general) will change their behaviour if we can change their attitudes of greatest relevance to the behaviour in question. We cannot predict which people will change or how much they will change, but a change in the attitudes of the population should be accompanied by a change in the behaviour of the population. (Zimbardo et al., 1977: 52)

In this light, the utility of assessing attitudes as a cultural technology of regulation can be demonstrated by Boddy and Buchanan’s advice on managing ‘change projects’:

Assess attitudes. What evidence was there about the enthusiasm and commitment of those working on the project? Were there signs or hints of resistance, which might suggest a change of approach? Were staff becoming frustrated by delays, difficulties or changes to plan, which the manager needed to do something about? Or were they enthusiastic and positive about the activity, and going out of their way to make it work? (Boddy and Buchanan, 1992: 150)

This is presented as an element of ‘managing the control agenda’, a major facet of the ‘continuous monitoring process to keep variances acceptably small’ (1992: 149). The important notion here is the status of attitudes as evidence: even if not the ‘enduring entities’ they are so often assumed to be, they reflect the psychic status of persons within evaluative hierarchies and the choices of individuals to show whether they intend to collaborate or not with managerial practices.

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The values we internalise, the attitudes we exhibit, will all reflect the choices, however limited, we have made and the learned constraints within which we act. Our unique history of learning and socialisation (see next chapter) enables us to produce a subjective identity which is malleable in both our own terms and those of the others and the organisations we encounter. We produce something which others see as our ‘personality’ but which in effect is simply an actively managed and continually rehearsed manipulation of our identity, fitted to what we have to do and what we want to do.

Personality: masks for tasks

Personality is defined in terms of ‘the physical, mental, moral and social qualities of the individual’ (McKenna, 1987: 11), or as whatever makes you different from other people. It is understood as a complex of characteristic features or traits that describe the particular types and/or dimensions through which personalities are categorised. This may be the ultimate contradiction in organisational psychology, in that the study of ‘unique’ personalities is placed almost wholly in the service of the production of standardised measures aimed at the categorisation and selection of individuals so that they can be fitted into their appropriate niches in organisational cultures.

The psychological understanding of how an individual develops a distinctive personality depends, like that of perception, on the notion of categorisation. Because personality is generally understood within a series of categorisations, its relationship to the construction of identity cannot be separated from the activities of those who produce the categories. Hence the explanation of personality in an organisational setting is more directly connected to the use of personality theory by managers than is the case with perception.

Describing personality as that which makes an individual different from others essentially defines it as that which sets the boundaries of what you are and what you are not. However, the way the notion of personality is used in OB highlights this type of definition as an idealised, liberal conception that is in direct contradiction to operational concerns with the controlled performance of work. The study of personality from this angle centres around the identification and prediction of consistent and/or distinctive modes of response in individuals. Some of the more recent approaches, which attempt to account for the interaction of personality with situational factors, would term these modes of response as dispositions, which include emotions, cognitions, attitudes, expectancies and fantasies (Clark and Hoyle, 1988). Distinctive behaviours in this sense are not the same as uniquely individual behaviours. They would be typical ways of reacting to people or situations which would distinguish an individual as belonging to a category of persons. Thus people who are seen to react in a consistently uncooperative fashion may be placed into a stereotypical category whereby their future behaviour will be assumed to be typical of that sort of person who is ‘difficult’ or a ‘problem person’.

Behaviour, then, is assumed to be inherent in the individual’s personality, biologically or genetically fixed. Being fixed, it is possible to predict, and being possible to predict it becomes a useful tool in controlling behaviour. Personality theory becomes an exercise in discovering how these various modes of response vary over time and between situations, in order to refine the levels of categorisation and prediction possible. For example, what kind of observed behaviour in a person is sufficient to

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label him or her as a troublemaker? Or what type of situation will influence a person to reveal different aspects of or levels of his or her ‘undesirable’ behaviour? Approaches such as that of Clark and Hoyle (1988) and that of Aronoff and Wilson (1985; see Hosking and Morley, 1991: 9–13), which attempt to contextualise personalityin the social process, do acknowledge that dispositions can be modified by situations and experience, but still focus on how these variables can be combined to predict behaviour.

Types, traits and tests

For OB as a ‘science’, this process frequently results more in a battery of methodologies and techniques for selecting the ‘right person for the job’ than in an account of personality. These are used to select prospective employees or candidates for promotion into categories which show how well they fit into organisational culture, thus making it easier to take decisions about them. Personality tests and inventories effectively perform the same function for an organisation as stereotypes do for an individual or group. They help to sort out the bewildering variety of information available about organisational members into categories which can be easily comprehended and dealt with. The last thing with which a science of personality of this sort is concerned is that which makes us subjectively unique individuals. There may be interest in what makes a particular individual different to others, but only to the extent that it might be a pointer to a characteristic useful or damaging to the organisation.

In delineating categories of personality characteristics, psychologists tend to fall back on two main sets of concept. The first of these, personality types, are predetermined categories into which we ‘fit’, and which represent broad generalisations of character such as ‘moody’ or ‘lively’. The second, personality traits, are habitual behaviours or tendencies to behave in particular ways: for example tendencies to react in an anxious, reserved or outgoing fashion. Types or personality factors are generally used to refer to patterns or clusters of traits or personality variables, which can be used to map the profiles of individuals using factor analysis of responses to selfreport questionnaires. The Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI: Eysenck and Wilson, 1975) groups clusters of variables – such as reserved, unsociable, quiet, passive, careful – into factors, in this case introversion. The factors used by Eysenck, intro- version–extraversion and stability–neuroticism, are based on Jungian psychodynamic theory, as are those utilised by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Cattell’s 16PF (Personality Factors). These days types are generally reduced to the ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions characterised by tendencies to extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, will to achieve and openness to experience.

Personality inventories are still used by organisations on tens of millions of people every year in selection and to determine who will make good managers or will be eligible for promotion. Cattell’s 16PF scale, which is based on the same basic types as the EPI, is widely criticised on both its content and generalisability, and yet still is used because it appears to select people who will make good managers. Hollway (1984) notes that it does not really matter whether the 16PF tells us anything realistic about personality, as it actually works by fulfilling the expectations of existing managers about what makes a good manager. That is, it identifies people like themselves, who are in the main ‘male, middle-class and middle-aged’ and, in the West, most often white. Since it is possible to work out which are the appropriate types of answer to

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the questions, it does not really matter if the respondent does not actually belong to the same social groupings as the dominant organisational culture he or she is trying to enter. It will help if he or she does, as it makes ‘correct’ responses easier to identify, but the ability to lie correctly is just as good a sign that the candidate is capable of becoming, and willing to become, the kind of person who will fit. Candidates who are unwilling to frame the right kind of responses, or are incapable of doing so, automatically select themselves out, regardless of their actual managerial potential. For example, graduates going through the ‘milk-round’ career selection may sit similar tests up to five times in the course of their applications. The conclusion that such tests are used for ‘people processing’ rather than individual treatment of personal characteristics and differences is hard to escape, and produces the conclusion that they are more effectively ‘gate-keeping’ rather than selection methods. Indeed, such tests were originally used in the UK in the First World War to screen out ‘neurotic’ soldiers: that is, those who did not want to fight! Current doubts on the use of tests have led to recommendations on using techniques such as structured interviews and role-playing in assessment centres, though the expense and effort involved makes it unlikely that these would be used extensively in smaller organisations.

Charles Johnson and Steve Blinkhorn (a designer of tests himself) claimed in Nature that tests lack validity and are difficult to replicate, and that there is not much evidence that tests predict job success except at the extremes of the range tested. In any case, the scores obtained are often not influential or even used in actual selection decisions, and of course, job seekers being questioned are unlikely to respond dispassionately. Their conclusions were that many different types could actually be successful in any particular job, and that much of personality testing is in fact no more than ‘pseudoscience’.

Personality testing is however currently undergoing something of a revival, as a new generation of computerised personality profiling systems are coming onto the market. Their ease and speed of use, combined with neat computer printouts detailing managerial potential, reinforce an air of spurious objectivity in their validity as managerial tools. Most of them are still of course based on systems such as the EPI, but do not impose the same levels of cost in terms of licensing and training for their administration and interpretation as the older paper-based systems. In the US, the polygraph was for a long time a staple in the testing of employees due to its claim to be able to detect lying, based on changes in the electrical conductivity of the skin. However the reliability and ethical implications of its use has led to restrictions since 1988. Voice Stress Analysis (VSA) has been touted as a method which can replace the polygraph, though with a fine irony the American Association of Police Polygraphers cite a 1996 Department of Defense study to the effect that there is ‘no credible evidence to validate voice analysis as an effective instrument for determining deception’. Employers have returned to the use of personality style tests claimed to measure an employee’s honesty or integrity. If these in turn are banned, employers may turn to techniques like graphology (popular in Europe) and astrology (popular in the Far East) for selection and gatekeeping purposes.

Personality and selection

In utilising tests, employers are essentially clutching at straws, and on this basis will probably use anything that will help them make some kind of systematic decision.

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Other forms of selection/screening that may be influential in the future include genetic screening, used to detect tendencies to congenital disease (and possibly stress through tendencies to heart disease), and lifestyle screening, used for detecting hazardous elements of personal lifestyles, for example dangerous hobbies, addictions and so on. These are driven mainly by the possible reduction of insurance costs that could be achieved through their use (as is also the case for the smoke-free workplace), and by the costs of retraining replacements. Overall the value of all of these developments is in their capacity to reduce complex factors to simple stereotypical categorisations. Thus, they make the decision-making process for personnel departments simpler, more cost-effective and less dependent on skilled staff – a veritable Taylorism of recruitment.

The underlying assumption behind techniques such as the 16PF, that managerial ability is somehow related to personality factors, would almost certainly ignore the kind of managerial ability it takes to, say, hold down a job, run a household and bring up children. But of course the dominant cultures in most organisations and institutions are not composed of the working women who have to display such abilities. The assumption is not about personality as such, but about having, or aspiring to, the right kind of personality. In contrast to managerial assessment, the assessment of shopfloor workers has traditionally focused on psychometric tests of capacities and aptitudes rather than personality. Psychometric tests examine factors such as verbal, logical and mathematical reasoning, and are said to have high test–retest validity, in that they yield similar results over time for the same subjects, which is not necessarily the case with personality inventories. Both are tests of the ability to do the job, the difference being that it is assumed that only in the higher levels of organisational hierarchies does personality become a relevant factor. The utility of psychometric tests is in essence their cost-saving ability to predict who is capable or willing to be trained. Hollway (1984: 50) also notes that where psychometric tests are used in assessment centres, the more objective information they yield is still contaminated by the subjective preferences of decision-makers, possibly on the basis of photographs and biographical details attached to assessment forms. It is again the pragmatic psychology of Taylorism that is at work here: as long as the person can do the job, who they are and what they are is of little importance. The personality of a manager is not important, as long as he or she has a ‘managerial’ personality.

Other personality factors and characteristics employed in assessment include locus of control, self-monitoring, self-efficacy and positive/negative affect. Locus of control (Rotter, 1972) refers to whether we believe that we control events (internal) or events control us (external); likewise self-monitoring (Snyder and Gangestad, 1986) refers to how attentive we are to internal states (low) or to appropriate situational and interpersonal cues (high) in determining our behaviour. High self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977) is the extent to which we believe we can overcome obstacles and get things done, whereas positive and negative affect represent the extent to which we accentuate the positive and negative in ourselves. In managerial selection, assessment and development, the preference is for the person who demonstrates an internal locus of control, low self-monitoring, high self-efficacy and positive affect. Thus supplicants for managerial status are measured against what is effectively a stereotype of an ‘ideal’ manager, mainly attentive to the demands of managerial identity and practice. In personality and attitude assessment, as in stereotyping, projection and attribution, the assignment of categories on the basis of limited information can lead to damaging consequences.

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For example, the assigning to personality of a biologically-fixed nature that can be assessed through the identification of types and traits can reinforce the notion that problems within an organisation are rooted within the pathological personality characteristics and behaviours of individuals. Thus the interpersonal, social and organisational problems that arise can be blamed on bad attitudes and in turn on bad personalities. The end result is blaming bad personalities on genetic inheritance, and then we are one step from the attitude that says that to resolve the problems you need to remove the people who cause them. (See Chorover 1979 and Henriques, 1984 for extended discussions of biological and cognitive determinism in social theory and practice.) At a less extreme level, the branch manager at Insco commenting on the traits appropriate to sales work in insurance delineates them in a sex-typed fashion which acts to render problematic the employment of women in this area:

I’m looking for whether they’ve got drive, initiative and are basically a self-starter.

So he must want to get on, and get on by his own efforts. (Knights and

Collinson, 1987: 156)

The focus on traits and types in OB is a function of their utility in making personality amenable to classification and manipulation. Yet personality to a great extent is simply the observable manifestation of identity. It is essentially similar to the notion of social identity, which a person develops and constructs through negotiation and interaction with others. In this sense, personality cannot simply be a cluster of traits; it is a process. It is not something that can be measured in terms of the ways in which people tend to react. Personality is a proactive process in which people present to others the image that will most benefit them in the situation in which they are. This is reflected in the use of development profiling systems that ask you to outline your strengths, weaknesses and career-related goals, as well as how, and by when, you intend to achieve them. They use techniques such as ‘domain mapping’ and self-report questionnaires similar in style to the Occupational Personality Questionnaire from the Saville and Holdsworth consultancy firm. The OPQ is claimed to be a way for people to indicate their own perceptions of self, and such self-descriptions are validated on the basis that they relate well to expert descriptions of respondents. Such systems have the added utility of producing a public commitment from the respondent, as well as reinforcing individual responsibility in the same fashion as ‘project-based working’, as noted in the section on attitudes.

The focus on ‘self-report’ and its links to disciplined and goal-oriented behaviour gives us insights into what testing and the panoply of related measures, for example, assessment centres, are really about. The whole point is to sell yourself to a prospective or present employer on the basis of how well your personal agenda and goals line up with objectives at organisational, departmental and group/personal levels. This means that selection, gatekeeping and appraisal are more to do with the management of impressions than with the FMJ/FJM paradigm (see Chapter 14) assumed in HRM practice. The process of acquiring a personality, a social identity, is itself influenced by filling out personality inventories or going through an assessment centre. It necessitates putting over an impression of your personality that is appropriate rather than accurate. The personality exhibited in this situation would be a mask appropriate to the task at hand and is achieved through impression management, which we will examine in more detail in Chapter 21.

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Conclusion

Though the mask we present might be appropriate to our own reading of how to cope with a situation, it might not fit others’ expectations of how we should react. Argyris (1967) examined the extent to which the demands of managerial and organisational practices were inconsistent with the drive towards greater independence, self-control and complexity in the maturing personality. For employees, especially at the lower levels of organisational hierarchies, the imperatives of managerial control and decision-making may lead to frustration of their desire to actively pursue meaningful goals and to the employment of defence mechanisms to protect their personal identity. These include regression to less mature behaviour, daydreaming, apathy and aggression, and may

Context

National culture

Institutional culture (e.g. church)

Groups and family influences

Organisational influences

Genetics

Content

Self-concept/personality

Social perceptions

Intelligence and thinking styles

Objectives and motivations

Conduct

Abilities and competencies

Styles

Actions

Feedback

Results

F I G U R E 1 5 . 2 T h e 3 C s m o d e l o f c o n t e x t – c o n t e n t – c o n d u c t a n d i n d i v i d u a l d i f f e r e n c e s

Source: T. Jackson (1994) Organisational Behaviour in Management, Oxford: ButterworthHeinemann, p. 42.

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be interpreted as personality characteristics by others. This might lead to the kind of ‘assumption trap’ attributed to Theory X attitudes (see Chapter 19), prompting managers to be even more directive and coercive. Likewise our assessment of the personality we need to exhibit might be inappropriate to guide our conduct in face of unfamiliar cultural contexts. Jackson (1994) proposes a ‘3Cs’ (context–content–conduct) model of the factors which need to accounted for in linking our individual differences to our behaviour in social processes (see Figure 15.2). This model indicates that personality, like perception, is interdependent with our socialisation and intention. It is constructed in relation to what one is trying to achieve, to developing strategies to survive the circumstances one has to endure. It is a tool that allows individuals to manipulate their own environment, even at the same time that it allows others to manipulate them in organisations. The personality component of our identity indicates the types of influence to which we are open, but whether such influences actually have an effect on us is determined by whether we learn from them, and the extent to which that learning changes us. We need to learn in order to check on the validity of the identity we have secured for ourselves, and its appropriateness in our current context.

16 Learning, Change and Innovation

Given further acceleration, we can conclude that knowledge will grow increasingly perishable. Today’s ‘fact’ becomes tomorrow’s ‘misinformation’. This is no argument against learning facts or data – far from it. But a society in which the individual constantly changes his job, his place of residence, his social ties and so forth, places an enormous premium on learning efficiency. (Toffler, 1970: 374)

Whether modern occupational patterns have changed to the extent that Toffler predicted 30 years ago is debatable, but the focus on learning he forecast has most certainly come to pass. Toffler was perhaps most prophetic in asserting that we will have to ‘learn how to learn’ (1970: 374), a phrase that is by now familiar to many in educational and business organisations. Learning is commonly defined in relation to the individual in such terms as ‘a relatively persistent change in an individual’s possible behaviour due to experience’ (Fontana, 1985: 64). The use of learning theory in organisational behaviour (OB), on the other hand, is tied to refining the processes by which individuals are socialised into the behaviour patterns required by organisations. Such socialisation is accomplished through prescriptions aimed at increasing the effectiveness of training programmes (see Arnold, Cooper and Robertson, 1998: chapter 15, for a good account), and in team and cultural initiatives aimed at achieving organisational change.

In this chapter we will first look at how learning and associated socialisation processes have come to have such importance in the mainstream OB agenda. We then examine current managerial practices in systems of staff and managerial development profiling, and move on through these to critiques of so-called organisational learning. Using as an exemplar the phenomenon of the learning organisation, in which learning how to learn is supposedly a way of life, we argue that learning organisation initiatives are essentially technologies of regulation aimed at facilitating change processes. Lastly, we move from considering the rather eclectic change literature to the more substantial literatures on innovation and creativity, bringing in the issue of sustainability to link the themes and topics we explore to the previous discussion of learning.

Learning and socialisation: seeing what to do

Our perceptual organisation enables us to comprehend our experience, but if we do not learn from it then our experience is of little use. The concepts and mechanisms of individual learning are of fundamental importance to understanding how we build up both unique identities and common behavioural patterns out of perceptual experience. Accounts of learning might then be expected to focus on how and where we acquire the behaviours appropriate and necessary to our social functioning and survival. In the psychological literature, this is usually presented in terms of models based variously on behaviourist, cognitive and social learning theory.

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The behaviourist model focuses on associative and instrumental learning. In the former process, proposed by Pavlov and refined by Watson (1930), we learn to behave in a certain fashion because we identify and associate that behaviour with a particular stimulus. For example, a bell or buzzer signalling the end of a tea-break can cause us to stop what we are doing and go back to work even if there is no supervisor present to tell us to do so. We do this because we have identified the stimulus as signalling the danger of punishment for non-compliance and associate it with the behaviour of returning to work. We are thus conditioned to obey the buzzer. The process of instrumental learning or operant conditioning takes this a stage further, and provides more explanation of why we learn, in that it focuses not on the stimulus, but on the consequences that follow the behaviour. This process, pioneered by Thorndike and refined by Skinner (1971), focuses on the way in which the rewards and punishments which are the outcomes of a behaviour become associated with that behaviour. If we do not go back to work when the buzzer sounds and get away with it, then we are rewarded by extending our rest period and by avoiding the associated punishment. Thus the likelihood of our doing the same thing in a similar situation is reinforced by the positive consequences of the behaviour.

These two mechanisms have been used at one time or another to explain the learning of just about every type of behaviour by the process of shaping, being repeatedly conditioned to close approximations of the desired behaviour. They do not however tell us very much about the mental processes which allow us to associate stimuli and behaviour or to expect and assess consequences, given that behaviourism does not regard mental processes as open to examination. The positive (reward) and negative (punishment) aspects of reinforcement schedules do however, neatly fit into what we term the technologies of regulation which back up the processes of control in organisations. The incentives to work harder and the disincentives to social and collective interaction with other workers which a piecework system encourages present a good example of these strategies of control. McKenna (2000: 193–7) notes that the techniques of organisational behaviour modification which use conditioning and reinforcement principles to attempt to ‘shape’ the behaviour of workers (for example in areas such as safety practices and absenteeism) are mainly confined to ‘highly controllable situations’, the basic flaw in such techniques being that they ignore the ‘interaction between situational and personal factors’ which is ‘encapsulated in social learning theory’ (2000: 198).

The theoretical base of behaviourism does not really explain how we acquire new behaviours. It does not explain how someone would ignore the warning buzzer the first time, beyond doing it accidentally. Theorists such as Chomsky have constructed damning critiques of behaviourism in terms of the inability of conditioning, reinforcement and shaping to explain phenomena such as the acquisition and use of language. Social learning theory, on the other hand, explains novel behaviour on the basis of observing and imitating the behaviour of others. Thus we could become socialised into ignoring the buzzer and pushing the limits of how long we can take for a tea-break as part of a social process whereby we both reinforce our own actions and are reinforced by the successful actions of others in our workgroup.

To explain this we need some recourse to cognitive theory, which emphasises the role of insight and the building up of schema, mental maps which allow us to act on the basis of imperfect knowledge and expectation, rather than the trial and error approach of the behaviourists. For instance, we could learn to ignore the buzzer in the