The Organization Man Page 21
Back at the office the job of steering the right middle course requires more and more skill. The increasingly “democratic” atmosphere of management has opened up opportunities for the executive, but it has also made more difficult the task of sizing up the relative rankings around the place and judging the timing of one’s pushes. The overt differences in status and office amenities are much less than before, but the smaller the differences the more crucial they can become to the individual. It is easy to joke about whether or not one has a thermoflask on his desk or whether the floor is rubber tiled or carpeted, but the joking is a bit nervous and a number of breakdowns have been triggered by what would seem a piddling matter to the observer. Where does one stand in this shifting society in which standing depends so largely on what other people think? Even a thermoflask is important if it can serve as a guidepost—another visible fix of where one is and where others are.
“You get into a certain position,” one forty-year-old executive explains, “and you start getting scared that somebody else might want the job you have. You can’t tell who he might be, so you take on the protective coloring so you won’t look as if you are ambitious and have the others move in on you.” The best defense against being surpassed, executives well know, is to surpass somebody else, but since every other executive knows this also and knows that the others know it too, no one can ever feel really secure. Check vacation records, and you will find that the higher up the man is, the more likely is the vacation to be broken up into a week here and a week there and, furthermore, to be rescheduled and postponed to suit the company rather than the family. “I like to take my vacation in two or three stretches instead of three or four weeks,” one executive confesses. “I don’t do it for my health. If you go away for three weeks, when you come back you find that they have rearranged your entire job. Someone has to carry on while you are gone and they are in your files, and when you get back the people will ask you questions about your job on account of what others did while you were away. I don’t blame them, mind you; I would do exactly the same thing.” (In Blandings’ Way, Eric Hodgins has sketched a commuter’s reverie that has occurred to many a management man. Today, the executive thinks miserably to himself, is the day they find me out.)
Can he “belong?” let us turn now to the question of company loyalty. It is at the heart of the clash between the Protestant Ethic and the Social Ethic, for, ideologically, all the new emphases call for a closer spiritual union between the individual and The Organization. As the prophets of belongingness have maintained, greater fealty to The Organization can be viewed as a psychological necessity for the individual. In a world changing so fast, in a world in which he must forever be on the move, the individual desperately needs roots, and The Organization is a logical place to develop them.
There are some highly practical forces at work to compel more loyalty. With the great increase in fringe benefits, the development of pension and annuity plans, the individual’s self-interest is bound up more tightly than before in continued service in one organization. Why, then, should a man leave a company? If a man breaks the ties at such expense to himself, some now maintain, it can only be because of a serious maladjustment—either in the individual or in the company.
As in other aspects of organization life, the younger generation of managers-to-be show themselves markedly more in favor of loyalty than their elders. When I asked a group of executives whether they thought that in the years ahead they should make a point of keeping their eyes open for opportunities elsewhere, two thirds stated, emphatically, that they should. I asked the same question of several groups of younger men. Only one third thought the executive should keep his eyes open; the consensus was to the effect that such behavior was characteristic of the What-Makes-Sammy-Run type, and the companies would be better off without such people.
With The Organization growing more ever more benevolent, it would seem logical to assume that there are fewer defections these days, and many people (including the author) have done so. But the assumption may be false, and let me now introduce some contrary evidence. One available measure of company loyalty is the change in the number of people moving from one company to another. When you look into this you find indications that since the war there has been somewhat more movement, rather than less.
According to a study by the management-consultant firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton, there are now twenty-nine more personnel changes per hundred management jobs than before the war, and a great part of the increase is caused by switches from one company to another. An analysis of the alumni records of several colleges reveals the same trend. Of the men who were graduated in the late thirties, the number who have worked for only one corporation are in a minority (between 20 and 35 per cent). A hefty majority have changed jobs two or three times; among men fifteen years and more out of college the men who have worked for four or more corporations is likely to outnumber those who have worked for only one. Similarly, a great many men are shifting out of their original fields entirely. In twenty-five years four out of every ten Harvard ’26ers have switched fields; in only ten years three out of ten ’39ers have switched.
Are job changers the unsuccessful, the “floaters”? Some of them are, of course, but many of the job changers are among the most obviously successful of their age group. A study we made at Fortune of nine hundred top executives reveals that only a third of America’s leading corporation executives are in the same firm they started with; 26 per cent had been with another company, and 40.5 per cent had been with two or more. Of the chief executives of companies, forty-three had been hired directly into their present positions from another company—and for many of these men this was only one of a long series of moves.
As the growing number of business-school graduates goes up the ranks, furthermore, top management may become even more fluid. A study made by the Harvard Business School of alumni of selected classes since 1911 is an indication. Making allowances for the different time lapse for each class and the disruption of the war, the record of job changes indicates that the professional manager is shifting companies—and fields—with increasing facility. The class of 1936 is typical of the developing pattern: only 22 per cent have stuck with one company since graduation, 26 per cent have worked for two, 24 per cent for three, and 28 per cent for four or more. Later classes haven’t had as much chance to move, but they seem to anticipate that they will: of the 137 members of the class of 1951, only 28 per cent said that they expected to stay with their present companies.*
The corporations’ pension and benefit programs do lead to a certain entrapment, but there are counter-forces. For the simple reason that most large organizations have remarkably similar programs, this adhesive factor tends to wash out. It is true, of course, that the longer a man stays, the more equity in the form of company-paid annuities and deferred profit sharing he builds up, and he cannot take all this with him. If a man finds a good slot in another corporation the latter will more than make up the difference in the annuity payments and deferred profit sharing the man left behind in the other company. The same prosperity which has helped corporations to be so munificent in benefits has also created expanding opportunities, so the executive does not have to be overly preoccupied with the security that a fixed position affords.
And how important to him, really, is this kind of security? Booz, Allen & Hamilton analyzed the attitudes of some 422 executives, who have made the jump. The findings appear to come together on one vital point: in the majority of cases the primary reason for switching was not money, increased security, or location. The executives switched most often because advancement was blocked. With executives who checked only one reason for switching, the order was: (l) bigger job, more responsibility; (2) don’t like present management policies; (3) advancement in company uncertain; (4) change of activity desired. In seventh place: increased income. It is clear between the lines that the great motivating factor was the sense of a ceiling, psychological or actual, in one job and the need f
or more self-expression through another. Security was rarely mentioned.
The executive’s own dissatisfactions are not the only factors stimulating switching. Though the executive may not know it, if he has been doing a notably good job his name is probably in the card files of one or more of the management-consultant firms. And the files are active; if an executive is getting restless the intelligence has a way of reaching the consultants, and even if he isn’t restless they might approach him anyway. To a degree not commonly recognized, a great proportion of consultants’ work consists of matching such men with clients dissatisfied with some of their own people—and the secret talent hunt that has resulted is not abating. “More than they used to,” one consultant says, “corporations seem to feel that around the corner is the dream boy.”
The fact is not unnoticed within companies. Since so many corporations do look elsewhere for their top executives, many men shy at committing their psyche wholly to the company because they know that when the time comes for their crack at a particular spot the company is as likely as not to go out and hire a banker or a lawyer or some other outsider to fill it. The result is a good bit of almost premature restlessness. “I have to battle with my clients to keep them from changing jobs too much,” says a veteran of a big placement agency. “My boys see this going on all around them and they get restless. There is one top man who has made five different connections in eight years, each time being lured away by another of the consultants at a bigger salary.”
Ironically, it is the corporation itself that taught the executives how to fly. Because transfer policy has exposed its young men to a succession of environments and new contacts, cutting old roots has not the terrors for them that it does for those who have never moved. Yet for the corporation as well as the individual, the individual’s ability to move is profoundly necessary.
The fact that ties are increasingly easy to sever acts as a counter-force against the tendency for an organization to inbreed itself into a static, encompassing bureaucracy. As long as corporations have any life in them, they will always be productive of conflicts and tensions, and thus mobility, or the prospect of it, is a necessary safety valve. Complete allegiance is a snare; for all the injunctions to “get along” with people, it is important for the organization that the executive know that there are times when he very well ought not to get along. And to be able to dissent, to champion the unpopular view, he must be able to move. He may not move—but the knowledge that he can, that he is psychologically capable of it, is the guarantee that he can maintain his independence.
He knows that he can never fully “belong.” The continuity that he seeks in his life is work that satisfies his drives, and thus he remains always a potential rebel. In a letter to the author, Richard Tynan describes the situation well: “For the sake of his career the executive must appear to believe in the values of his company, while at the same time he must be able to ignore them when it serves his purpose. What is good for the company is good for the executive—with exceptions. Perceiving these exceptions is the true executive quality.”
Above all, he must be able to perceive the possibility of leaving the organization, for if he does not he will never pressure his way to the top of it. He has high capacity for loyalty; he too wants to identify himself with the company. But he must also take frequent readings of the loyalty coming from the other direction and tacitly remind the company that he is desirable to other organizations too. (This, he explains ingeniously, is really the highest form of company loyalty since it makes the company more alert to make the best use of him, and so he doesn’t have to leave at all.) While he can grow as misty-eyed as the next man at the banquet honoring the Grand Old Man and the Unique Spirit of the company, the mist will clear away rapidly if the Spirit overlooks the opportunities that he feels are his due. Once again, it is he against the system.
In citing the amount of moving around as evidence that many executives are resisting the organization, I recognize that I thereby have somewhat undercut my argument about the long-range trend. I can only say (1) I am happy that the facts show the resistance; (2) I hope that they continue to. But it is hard to be persuaded that trends will automatically keep on balancing each other out. The vision of the younger men and the growing philosophy of the encompassing organization are not lightly to be dismissed because they have not yet created that which is sought.
It can be argued that nothing will change; that the difference between the older executives and the professional managers seniors want to be is only one more variant of the customary difference between myth and reality; that it is a new way of making supportable to organization people the harsh fact that they have always been without independence. Or, possibly, that the difference is due to lack of experience and that the young men talk the way they do because they don’t know any better and the personnel managers talk that way because they never will.
But I do not think so. The Social Ethic is no mere opiate of the white collar. This would suppose a cynicism The Organization could not abide; furthermore, there would be no feasible way of telling promising young men in advance that it’s not meant for them but for those who can’t get ahead. Nor is it simply the wishful dream of the young. The growing volume of books, speeches, and training courses for the new outlook is symptomatic of a deep and long-range shift. It is an orthodoxy for all a-building, and wishful thinking that it may be, it will have a deep effect on all organization people.
I am not trying to prophesy that these beliefs will create a unified, contented drone. Rather than tranquilize the individual, these human-relations aspects of organization life that are to assuage insecurity are just as likely to provoke another kind of insecurity. This is not to say that the fluidity of organization life is an absolute boon, nor is it to demean the more democratic climate of the modern organization. But these advances carry a price. Benefits too, yes, but we can resolve the conflicts in organization life only if we openly recognize their existence, rather than if we deny them.
It is not so much that The Organization is going to push the individual around more than it used to. It is that it is becoming increasingly hard for the individual to figure out when he is being pushed around. The older and more authoritarian systems may have confined a man’s area of maneuver, but, like the military, they did provide a clear set of rules. A man knew where he had to bend to the system and he knew where he could assert himself against it —where he could put the telescope to the wrong eye.
But not now. As always, the way to success in an organization life depends upon being aware that most of the decisions that affect one’s destiny are made by others, and that only rarely will one have the opportunity to wrest control into his own hands. And it is this vital point that the Social Ethic blurs, for it denies that there is any antithesis. What are the standards by which one should judge whether he is co-operating or surrendering? One wrong turn can destroy all that has gone before, but how do you know when it has come? What are the terms of the struggle?
“One of the hazards of the kind of life we lead,” says a man now poised at the threshold of the top management of one of our largest corporations, “is the loss of well-defined objectives. What is the purpose? What is the end? I was deeply a part of my job in the chemical division. My wife and I were deeply a part of the community; I was contributing and was effective. Then they asked me to come to New York—the V.P. in charge told me that by coming here I’d have a box seat in the ‘Big Time.’ If his guess has been bad, it’s a terrible waste. I hope the company isn’t playing checkers with me. I feel a lack. I don’t know what I’m being groomed for. I don’t know what contacts to keep alive. A sales manager knows he should keep his customer contacts, but in the broad management philosophy you can’t do this. You have to guess. I felt I had trained for twenty years for a tremendous job that had plenty of challenge, and I was in it for only nine months. Somehow I feel this move is out of my pattern—whatever that is. I’d hate to lose all that’s behind me because some
body is playing checkers with me.”
These apprehensions are not maladjustments. No one likes to be played checkers with, and the man The Organization needs most is precisely the man who is most sensitive on this point. To control one’s destiny and not be controlled by it; to know which way the path will fork and to make the turning oneself; to have some index of achievement that no one can dispute—concrete and tangible for all to see, not dependent on the attitudes of others. It is an independence he will never have in full measure but he must forever seek it.
* I would be more shaken by these protestations were it not for our mailing list change-of-address records. To interpolate from Fortune’s circulation records, promotion for the man and change of address for his family correlate rather highly—and rather quickly. In the case of the wives I interviewed for the articles I have gone back from time to time in connection with follow-up studies and have found that some of those most insistent about staying put and happy have been the first to move out to Brinton Hills or its equivalents. Crestmere Heights, it now appears, was just a phase. And not the last one either, by a long shot.
* Let me note that there are other ways of interpreting the figures I have given. While I believe they indicate a slight increase in the amount of job switching, other observers have held the opposite. With much the same source material, David R. Roberts of the Graduate School of Business Administration, Carnegie Institute of Technology, has argued that there is less job switching (“The Determinants and Effects of Executive Compensation”). I think he’s wrong, but this area of activity is so difficult to measure with any statistical surety that conclusions can only be tentative.
PART IV
The Testing of Organization Man