Pshychology101

¶ … Psychology to Organizations

In many ways, business organizations are reflections of those who create them and occupy positions of executive leadership and direction. Generally, business founders and organizational leaders who are functional psychologically and whose motivations correspond appropriately to the legitimate needs of the organization and its personnel tend to attract and cultivate individuals with similar characteristics and personal attributes. Conversely, business founders and organizational leaders whose motivations correspond to the need to overcompensate for personal shortcomings and psychological insufficiency tend to attract associates who mirror those negative personal characteristics and attributes.

While myriad factors contribute to the success of business organizations, those that meet certain fundamental criteria in the realm of psychology are often much better positioned for long-term success than those that do not meet those fundamental criteria. Ideally, the founders of any organization would lay the groundwork most conducive to organizational success in many ways.

In the realm of human psychology, some of the essential defining elements and characteristics consistent with the success of the organization would include establishing a climate that cultivates leaders; recognizing the primary sources of human motivation for achievement; distinguishing psychologically functional and dysfunctional sources of motivation; emphasizing the opportunity for intellectual independence, creativity; de-emphasizing over-reliance on natural inclinations toward social conformity; recognizing different aspects of human cognitive intelligence and learning capacity; and promoting personal and professional integrity.

Cultivating Organizational Leadership

Generally, the most successful organizations are those that seek to identify candidates for employment who have high potential for professional development into organizational leaders. Modern principles of business management and organizational psychology distinguish between management and leadership. Management is substantially limited to operational and administrative efficiency; leadership incorporates concepts such as the ability (and inclination) to help other develop professionally and achieve their fullest professional potential. Therefore, in designing a business organization for success, one would seek to hire supervisors and business managers who demonstrate high levels of leadership skills and to install a managerial development program whose primary purpose is to cultivate leadership skills throughout the organization.

Psychosocial Development, Self-Esteem, and Healthy Motivation for Success

By the time individuals are adults, they usually have reached the stage of psychosocial development where they have a natural desire to become part of a community in which they are valued and appreciated. In Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, this corresponds to the Esteem Phase of psychosocial development. In principle, Maslow suggested that there are two fundamentally different sources of motivation in relation to achievement and the need for self-esteem.

Specifically, pseudo-self-esteem (or "lower" motivation for self-esteem) is based on maintaining the perception that one is respected or admired by others, virtually irrespective of the underlying reasons why. Typical examples of lower-level-based self-esteem would include seeking status, personal recognition, and fame, as well as the general desire for attention from others. On the other hand, typical examples of genuine (or, in Maslow's terminology, "higher" motivation for) self-esteem would include the desire to earn the respect of others for substantive reasons rather than a blind yearning for admiration irrespective of the reason or the underlying value of the reason for that admiration.

While it is unconventional, one approach to cultivating a staff who are motivated healthily and who manifest genuine self-esteem would be through the use of an interview (or series of interviews) with a psychologist. While this has been a common practice in fields such as law enforcement, it has been comparatively neglected in modern business organizations. Today, several large financial services corporations are well-known for subjecting candidates for employment to extensive interviews as part of a weeding out process in relation to coping with stress or maintaining professional composure. The argument could easily be made that those efforts would be better spent subjecting candidates to psychological interviews and assessments designed to distinguish healthy sources of motivation for achievement and self-esteem from dysfunctional or less healthy sources of motivation for achievement and self-esteem.

Obedience to Authority, Conformity, Intellectual Independence, and Ethical Values

Today, ethical issues have become tremendously important aspects of modern business and business management. One need look no further than very recent headlines about the deterioration of ethical compliance in the financial services and home mortgage industries to realize that unethical practices are extremely dangerous to business organizations as well as to every component of society capable of being affected by ethical transgressions. The current American economic crisis was caused directly by the systemic ethical violations within the home mortgage and loan industry in conjunction with long-standing unethical practices throughout the financial services and negotiable securities markets. In essence, some of the nation's brightest minds spent the last decade or more devising highly complex methods of violating every element of the spirit of existing financial services industry regulation by inventing mortgage-backed securities and incredibly unethical and dangerous methods of playing both sides of the market without violating the letter of the law.

To a large extent, individuals within the fields involved followed the lead of superiors and allowed the profit margins demonstrated by colleagues and competitors to dictate their behavior. Many of them knew that what they were doing, particularly within the housing mortgage industry, was highly unethical, dishonest, and in many cases, highly illegal. Psychologists Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo (among others) demonstrated the tremendous capacity of human beings to abandon their own convictions to avoid conflicts with a group of peers and to follow unethical orders out of obedience to authority.

To help identify prospective employees who are less likely to abandon their own convictions and perceptions, one might include an element to test that characteristic in job applicants. Simple (but effective) methods might include placing applicants in benign but illustrative situations designed to test their susceptibility to the phenomenon of group think and conformity. In principle, the goal of the organization would be to hire individuals with higher resistance to conformity and to blind obedience to reduce the likelihood that unethical policies, practices, and procedures can become normal operational elements within the organization.