Организационная психология

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This contradiction is essential characteristic of any organization and permanently threatens its integrity. To exist as a unit an organization can only in the case, when the centripetal forces pronouncedly and steady dominate over centrifugal, when tendency for integration prevails over tendency for disintegration. However, the individualism and flexibility of human behavior with its instability in emotions, needs and motives can not provide the spontaneous development of stable tendency for cooperation. What after all can provide the victory of integration over disintegration, triumph of cooperation over individualism?

The majority of theories dealing with human organizations and joint actions agree that the first and indispensable condition for existence of any organization is development of a common goal[625]. Indeed, one could hardly overestimate the importance of common goal in any collective undertaking. Represented in the form of statement, which with less or more details reflects some desirable for organization results, the goal serves as a key factor determining the behavior of organizational members.

Where does this common goal come from? In whose head does it emerge or in other words, who is its subject? The idea that a common goal is a kind of shared organizational consciousness and expresses acceptable direction for actions for everyone in organization, though looks attractive and democratic, is in fact just a metaphor that does not move forward our knowledge of actual psychological mechanisms of organizational functioning.

If every member of organization, convinced in the validity of his own individual goal tries to promote it as a common goal, the "wagon" of this organization will never move anywhere. Somebody's even the most attractive individual goal by itself can be hardly perceived as significant by other people and one could not await that they will persistently follow it.

In order to make an integral organizational unit out of a group of people, the individual goal of one or several individuals must acquire some privilege over the goals of other members, that is this very individual (or group) should become the subject of the common goal of organization.

There is a well-known experiment in animal psychology, in which a monkey in order to satisfy its hunger has to get bananas suspended under the ceiling of the cage. The animal can get the desired fruits only if it put several boxes one over another. Each monkey on his own is able to accomplish the task quite quickly. However, when this task is given for a group of monkeys simultaneously, each animal tried to attain its goal never minding efforts and wishes of the other monkeys. This kind of cooperation inevitably evokes struggle for the boxes, conflicts and even fighting. Looking at nearly finished box construction and a fellow climbing upstairs, some of the monkeys can decide that it would be better to put the lowest box up... As a result — the "building" is never finished, goal is never attained and tied, hungry animals have nothing to do but to look in distress at inaccessible fruits'. To our mind, this experiment can serve as a good example of "organization", in which the individual goal of all members are equal and have no privilege over other goals. In such case we can state that the monkey community is completely deprived of any common goal.

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