Guerrilla Strategies in Organizational Frameworks

Guerrilla Government Guerrilla warfare is a type of warfare where a small band of fighters (whether professional, militia, or civilian) adopt the tactics of stealth soldiers, using sabotage, ambushes, hit-and-run strategies, etc., in order to exploit their most powerful tools -- mobility and the ability to fly under the radar undetected in order to score direct hits against the opposition, undermine the opposition's infrastructure, and bring down the opposition's system of support; in other words, it is irregular warfare conducted by an independent unit (O'Leary, 2014, p. 4).

Guerrilla warfare has been conducted in asymmetric warfare for ages, going back to the Civil War days, when guerrilla combatants waged war against opposing forces. In countries where insurrections and revolutions have occurred, such as in South and Central America, guerrilla warfare has been part of the strategy of combatants. It is essentially used by weaker/smaller but less easily identifiable/located forces against larger/slower, more encumbered forces (O'Leary, 2014). As Terry L.

Cooper (2012) notes, "nonviolent guerrilla warfare" is also a strategy employed within organizations by groups attempting to circumvent organizational obstacles or overcome oppositional forces (p. 227). It is a feature of "organizational delimitation" where the concept of the "para-economy is beginning to manifest itself in the neighborhood movement" (Cooper, 2012, p. 227). This is essentially the case with the Nevada Four, which employed nonviolent guerrilla style tactics in order to undermine the organizational encumbrances within the government regarding water rights (O'Leary, 2014, p. 35).

By going under the radar, and asking locals to donate water rights for tax benefits, the Nevada Four were able to pursue their objective of saving the wetlands. Asking the water rights holders to donate the rights essentially changed the power structure, with so many disparate groups claiming rights. As O'Learly (2014) notes, they essentially "embarrassed the government" by proving that the wetlands now had rights, a point which the government had denied all along. By "forging coalitions with interest groups outside their organization," (O'Leary, 2014, p.

36) the Nevada Four had pursue guerrilla style interventions against the monolithic enterprise blocking them from their goal: this earned them praise from some, such as the Sierra Club, opprobrium from others, such as the scientific and political communities, whose standard operating procedures were tossed aside by the Four (O'Leary, 2014, p.

39) The ethical implications of guerrilla employee protest are complex: on the one hand, achieving objectives depends upon renouncing the status quo standards of operating procedure, which provide "safe" networks, frameworks and connections; going outside of these implies dispensing with transparency and hiding one's actions for the time being. This raises the question of whether guerrilla protests are honest, but in a rigged system, it becomes a necessity for some, who want to achieve an objective that is outside the purview of the establishment (O'Leary, 2014).

Using Waldo's Map of Ethical Obligations, competing obligations for the Four could be identified as allegiance to public interest/general welfare competing with organizational/bureaucratic norms (saving the wetlands vs. giving up on water rights), and profession and professionalism vs. nation/country (the Four sacrificed the respect of their peers in.