Commitment is too easy!

Salancik outlines the relatively simple strategies for getting anyone committed to anything. The problem is to get the individual committed to behaviors that are right for him and right for the organization-and that isn’t easy. He provides guidelines for gaining commitment-and techniques for unraveling an unwanted commitment.

Gerald R. Salancik

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very age seeks its solutions in phrases that substitute for the common sense that somehow eludes it. Ours is no exception, having devoted the past 30 years to proclamations of confusion, self-doubt, and serious debate on whether the end will come with an enormous bang, a painful gasification, or merely a whimper occasioned by the exhaustion of irrecoverable resources. The catchwords earlier in this century were efficiency and organization. It was a time of hope, chastened by war and depression; its problems were solvable. And today? The new catchwords are more diffuse: fulfillment, involvement, equality, participation, and, most important of all, commitment. Organizational

Dynamics,

American

Summer

Management

What is commitment anyway? How do people become committed? What are the probable effects of commitment on behavior in organizations? How do you manage-the more precise word is manipulatecommitment in organizations? First things first. Commitment is a state of being in which an individual becomes bound by his actions and through these actions to beliefs that sustain the activities and his own involvement. Commitment is ubiquitous, so common that we are often unaware of its constraining effects and its subtle control over our behavior. Commitment is what makes us like what we do and continue doing it, even when the payoffs are not obvious.

1977. @ 1977, AMACOM, a division of Associations. All rights reserved.

In organizations, commitment takes many forms, some of them beneficial, some harmful. Its benefits depend on what the individual is committed to, not on whether he is committed. For organizations adapting to changing realities, commitments can at times be devastating. National Cash Register almost went out of business because its image of itself was more appropriate to its turn-ofthe-century glory. It had become inbred, ingrown, pompous. The United States has been accused of the unnecessary sacrifice of tens of thousands of its own soldiers because of its commitment to a policy in Vietnam that was known to be unworkable almost from the beginning of the war. The phenomenon of escalation is the tragic side of overcommitment. George Ball warned Lyndon Johnson as early as 1965: “Since we suffered large casualties, our involvement will become so great that we cannot without national humiliation stop short of achieving our complete objective.” Tom Stoppard captured the essence of overcommitment in his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: “They had simply traveled too far, and . . . momentum has taken over.” The British and French reenacted this drama in their alliance over the Concorde. What commitment does is sustain action in the face of difficulties. And that can have its good side. Without commitment individuals would be less likely to pursue goals for which the outcomes are uncertain. Commitment is what contributes to producing dedicated scholars, artists, missionaries, file clerks, taxi drivers, even presidents. During the pandemic plagues of the fourteenth century, commitment is what kept priests ministering to the needs of the dying, thus killing off a substantial portion of the clergy. Commitment can lead individuals to love their jobs so much that the rest of us find

them a bore. Studs Terkel tells of a dentist who made a backstage visit to the actress Geraldine Page to say, “I was sitting in the front row and looking up. Most of the time I was studying the fillings in your mouth. I’m curious to know who’s been doing your dental work.” Given the fact that the effects of commitment can be negative or positive, the important task is not to seek it blindly but to ask how it comes about and how it can best be managed to the advantage of the individual and the organization. That’s what this article is all about. To understand commitment, we must first understand that behavior is what is being committed, because behavior is a visible indicator of what we are and what we intend doing. Our behavior leads to expectations about what we will do in the future. These expectations surround our behavior and constrain us to act within them. Commitments thus mold our attitudes and maintain our behavior even in the absence of positive reinforcements and tangible rewards. Commitment implies that an employee will complete a project on time when he tells his supervisor that he will. The public statement “I will finish that by next Thursday” shapes and constrains subsequent behavior to conform much more than would be the case if a person said nothing. A person will like a product more after purchasing it and paying for it than before the purchase. Similarly, campaign workers will become avid fans of a political candidate after they have spent day after day canvassing for his election. It is the behavior that determines the attitude in such cases rather than the reverse, a point that in 1736 Benjamin Franklin appreciated to his advantage. Disturbed by the political opposition and personal animosity of one of his colleagues in Penn-

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Sylvania legislature, he sought to convert him into a friend. Franklin heard that the senator had a rare book in his library and asked to borrow it in a note “expressing my desire of perusing” it. The book came immediately and Franklin returned it in a week with another note “expressing strongly my sense of the favor.” The result? “When next we met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility. . . . We became great friends and . . . continued to his death.” Franklin manipulated a commitment. A good lay psychologist, Franklin got the senator to behave in a friendly manner toward him. This little ploy worked. The action taken by Franklin constrained the senator’s subsequent behavior. One implication of lending a rare and precious book is that the lender judges the borrower to be discriminating enough to appreciate such a fine object. It would appear a bit foolish for Franklin’s former foe, after having lent him the book, to then go before the legislature and call Franklin a rogue and a scoundrel. Franklin’s second move communicated the sense that both the borrower and the lender must be gentlemen of taste and distinction.

INDUCING COMMITMENTS

Commitment comes about when an individual is bound to his acts. Though the word bound is somewhat clumsy, what we mean by it is that the individual has identified

himself with a particular behavior. Three characteristics bind an individual to his acts and hence commit him. They are the visibility, the irrevocability, and the volitionality of the behavior. By manipulating these three characteristics, an individual can be made to be more or less committed to his acts and to their implications. Let us consider each in turn. The visibility of behavior

The first committing aspect of behavior concerns how visible and observable it is. Acts that are iecret or unobserved lack the force to commit because an act that has not been seen cannot be linked clearly to an individual. The person can deny or forget it. Public commitment is particularly important for getting individuals to fulfill goals to which they agree. Michael S. Pallak of the University of Iowa for instance, showed that homeowners who agreed to conserve energy were in fact more likely to do so when their participation in the program was published in the town’s newspapers. Sales incentive plans that include the annual goals of the sales agents have the same effect. When the expectations an individual sets for himself are publicized, they become the expectations that others hold for him too. They serve as.constant guides to future actions. One of the simplest and perhaps easiest means bof committing individuals to an organization is to make their identification with the organization widely known and highly visible. The association implies support. Organizations can use this simple fact to their advantage. When a new employee joins the organization, an announcement to the local or national press, along with a photograph, informs the world about the choice. Western Electric has recently

done this with rank-and-file employees in television spot advertisements that depict individuals at their work stations. Owens-lllinois, a major producer of packaging products, uses its annual reports to achieve the same effect. In 1974, for instance, it featured 3 1 employees in either text or photography. The text explains why: Considerable thought is devoted to ways to help Owens-Illinois people become more effective in their jobs. . . . We work hard at such things as job enrichment, open recognition for good performance, and providing a work climate that fosters thinking. As a result, we have highly motivated, thoughtful employees committed to a better way of doing things.

The employees cited in the report are likely to be more committed because of it. That behavior can be made more or less visible makes it relatively easy to induce commitment. The claims frequently made that modern organizations are anonymous is more a reflection of practices in certain organizations than anything inherent in the nature of organizations. It is quite feasible to increase the visibility of most behavior within organizations. It is easy enough to let an individual know that you know what he has done and is doing for the organization. It is just as easy for an inspector to write his name after an approval as it is to write his company number. It is just as easy to post a name placard above a work station as it is to leave the space blank. And it is easy to let everyone connected with the work of a particular individual know about his contribution. It is also easy enough to speak for an individual to groups outside the organization. For instance, one organization writes a letter of reference in behalf of its employees for credit applications. Still another writes a biannual commentary on the employee to his family, a sort of work report card. A

little hokey perhaps; but it does take the edge off anonymity. And it helps to make people feel a little more responsible, because they realize that others know what they are doing. Organizations are already well aware of the committing effects of visibility. Sometimes they minimize an employee’s exposure. Involvement in illegal, immoral, or simply distasteful activities are underplayed. Prison guards and combat soldiers are all shielded from being identified too closely with their necessary but unpleasant tasks. Minimizing a person’s identification can actually facilitate certain pursuits. Motivating an individual to take an an assignment that has low personal payoff but is nonetheless necessary is made difficult when others in the organization know it may be a loser. In such cases, the lessvisibility the better. The irreversibility

of behavior

Behavior would not be committing were it merely visible. In addition, the behavior must be relatively irrevocable. Visibility means the individual cannot deny that an act occurred; irrevocability means the behavior that occurred cannot be changed. This aspect of behavior, of course, adds to its constraining effects. One of the circumstances that locked Great Britain into producing the Concorde was a clause that the then-minister of Aviation Julian Amery wrote into the 1961 agreement with France. The clause provided that if either of the two venture

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partners withdrew, the entire costs of development to that point would be borne by the resigning party. It was a clause that made the agreement to proceed virtually irreversible, and the more irreversible the more fruitless the project became. The irreversibility or irrevocability of behavior is committing because in taking a step that cannot be retrieved one is left to accept the salient implications that support it. Because of this, in the future a person faces either regret over past acts or an assertion of their wisdom. A person who aims a loaded gun at someone, then fires, ends up either hating himself or hating his victim. It is the fact that we cannot go back and undo what has been done that narrows our alternatives so effectively. Several experimental studies illustrate this effect. These experiments of course do not have people shoot other people; instead they require individuals to administer an electric shock to others. The experiment is set up under the guise of a learning study, and the individuals are given a choice of whether to administer the shock. Those who do the shocking later believe the unfortunate victims have deserved their fate. But this occurs only if the harm cannot somehow be undone. When a victim is expected to have an opportunity to pay back the harm-doer, the victim is seen as a pretty nice fellow after all. The opportunity for retribution is used as a way of “undoing” the prior shock administrations. Few actions are so obviously irreversible as shooting someone or so costly to reverse as the Concorde agreement. Still, the more irreversible an action is, the more committing it becomes. Organizations have evolved several schemes for making a person’s attachment to his work more or less easily severed. One is to give employees benefit packages that are not transferable from one organization to another. Financial

arrangements with annuities that accumulate with tenure are such a mechanism. Other aspects of a person’s situation that increasingly attach the person to an organization by making leaving more difficult are the life-cycle stage and the lack of geographically convenient alternatives. Children in school; memberships in community organizations; participation in community affairs; differential accelerations in the cost of housing from one area to another; spouses with jobs and involvements of their own; or just too little time to go out and jobhunt-these are examples of the ways our lives entrap us in our present situation. The loss of pension benefits or gains from company stock options may well be less important in determining our behavior than the misery of a seven-year-old wondering what will happen to the rest of his life if the family moves from the best little league team in the country. The network of relationships we build for ourselves can ensnare us until we see no available alternatives. Of course, it is also true that a person’s tangle of relationships can separate him from an organization rather than keep him with it. A recent phenomenon in the United States is the two-income family, with its attendant problem of one employee quitting because of the superior opportunity that opens up somewhere else for the spouse. Sometimes an organization handles the situation by making both members of the family employees, thus putting the organization in the position of handling both careers with some degree of parity. When an individual’s own relationships do not bind him, attempts are frequently made to create a tangle of relationships that keep him in the organization. Team building and the one-big-happy-family approach to employees is one form of this, though to some extent an unnatural one that

Gerald R. Salancik began his studies in journalism, communications, and advertising at Northwestern University. He later returned to exfierimental social psychology, in which he took a doctorate at Yale University in 1970. He has consulted on long-range planning and forecasting, spending a year at the Institute for the Future where he first studied purposeful adjustment of organizations to environmental change. Winning commitment to organizational change became of interest to him at this time. He currently pursues this interest as associate professor of organization behavior with the department of business administration at the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign. He has written OWY 30 papers in the areas of commitment, organizational power, attitude change, and technological forecasting, and co-azrthored The Interview (1966), and two books in press-New Directions for Organizational Behavior and The External Control of Organizations. He consults on strategic planning problems for organizations and on issues of control and change.

weakens it. A person’s stability in social relationships comes from having money entanglements with partially overlapping sets of individuals. An individual whose relationships (friendships, workships, interest clubs) are all invested in the same set of individuals faces more strain to keep them balanced, but he or she will attempt to do this by keeping all relationships on a more shallow level. Movements of executives and other personnel from division to division is another form. This simultaneously prevents individuals

from establishing long-term relationships with outsiders and forces them to depend on personal relationships within the organization. The Rothschilds practiced one of the more impressive examples of this strategy with the children of the five sons who founded their international banking concern in Frankfurt, Germany. Each of the five sons was assigned to a different country and the sons’ children were becoming increasingly attached to the countries of their birth and therefore reluctant to move to another country. The Rothschilds solution was intermarriage among the children. The ties of marriage, like the ties of blood of the founding generation, bonded their organization despite the wars and intrigues that racked the host nations. The attempt in all these cases is to enmesh the individual with the organization to make reversing his position with the organization more costly and more painful. In many cases, however, such attention to a person’s relationships is not necessary. A good deal of an individual’s irreversible position in an organization develops quite naturally from his growth within the firm. As a person works for an organization, much of his skill and knowledge becomes increasingly parochial. More and more, what he understands about a business is what he understands about a very particular kind of business, and even at that only a particular way of doing business. Many of these skills may not be transferable to other organizations. As a consequence, he may of necessity become more and more committed to the organization in which these skills were developed. We even suspect that organizations work contrary to their own interests when they encourage employees to enroll in job training programs that make them more employable elsewhere. 67

We have emphasized the importance of irreversibility, because it does affect a person’s psy chological or emotional attachments to organizations. Barry Staw, the author of another article in this issue of Organizational Dynamics, recently illustrated the effects of an individual’s placing himself in a relatively irreversible relationship with an organization. He observed cadets from the Reserve Officers Training Corps, some of whom, were required to sign a two-year contract; others joined without a contract. This was during the Vietnam War, at the time of the first U.S. draft lottery for that war. By chance, some of the cadets had drawn numbers that indicated a low probability of their being drafted, while others received numbers indicating a high probability that they would be called up for service. Many of the cadets had joined the ROTC to avoid the draft; now those who knew that they had little chance of being called up had little reason for continuing in the program. We would expect their attitudes toward the program to deteriorate. And indeed this proved true, but only for those who had not signed a two-year contract. This noncontract group began disparaging the ROTC programs; some even took part in the pro-

test demonstrations against the war. But those with contracts actually became more attached to the programs. The brass buttons and steady drill created a new appeal. The inescapable is appealing in a way that transient situations rarely are. Once we have committed ourselves to a situation that ceases to have utilitarian value, we are forced to endow it with more emotional and rationalizing sources of appeal. This is what happened with the ROTC cadets; it also happens when dating couples take the final plunge and agree to marry. They begin to see themselves as more suitable for each other and more ideally matched than they had previously imagined. Behavior and personal volition Readers may have wondered whether the irreversibility of behavior would, all by itself, lead a person to become more attached to an organization. They may have recognized a sort of repulsive entrapment in some of the strategies; these hardly invite attraction. Well, the truth is that were the irreversible aspects of a situation only an entrapment, they would not enhance a person’s commitment. Indeed, they might decrease it. For entrapment suggests that our actions are not

“Volition is essential to all commitment. It I;. the cement that binds the action to the person and that motivates him to accept the implications 6s of his acts.”

taken of our own volition. Volition is essential to all commitment. It is the cement that binds the action to the person and that motivates him to accept the implications of his acts. The public nature of any behavior and its irrevocability join action into an indelible physical and social reality; each action affects the extent to which we assert that the action has taken place. Volitionand its operational equivalent, the acceptance of personal responsibility-links behavior to the person who is acting. Without volition, a behavior is not necessarily committing, for the person can always assert that he really did not cause the behavior himself. He thus would not have to accept the consequences of the behavior or care very much what he has done. It is perhaps the easiest way of getting free from behaviors, particularly those having disagreeable consequences. When the unpleasant aspects of a job become obvious, for instance, we can always say, “I’m doing it for the money, but I don’t like it. Not one bit.” This is a subtle form of disassociation. A more common one is what we witness when people make mistakes with possibly unpleasant consequences and attempt to weasel out of the situation with “It isn’t my fault; the machine just broke.” Volition, or personal responsibility, is the most ambiguous aspect of committing behavior. Unlike the other two, it is not observable and literally cannot be documented. It is always argued and always attributed. It can be attributed either by an individual himself or by others. Consider again the situation described by Staw: It is more than the fact that an individual signed a public document to remain in the ROTC program that affected his attitude. It is the fact that he did so

voluntarily. How was it voluntary when the contract was a requirement of the program? What makes the contract voluntary was that the cadet chose freely to enter into it. Everyone in his situation did not take the same action. Those who joined the ROTC to avoid the draft by and large avoided signing any contract. And if one person did sign when others did not, it must be because he chose to. And if he chose to, it must be because he liked it, particularly when there was no other reason for continuing in the program since he was not to be drafted anyway. And that is the conclusion he draws from the situation. He comes to like it because he chose it and his choice binds him to it. Another element that contributes to the ambiguity of volition is that all human actions are both forced and constrained, undertaken both under the volition of the actor and in response to external pressures. Even writers such as Dostoevski and George Bernard Shaw saw their acts of creation as the joint consequence of internal compulsions and external forces. The crafty old Benjamin Franklin got his opponent to like him in the same way. By persuading the senator to lend him a rare book voluntarily, he assured his friendship. It matters little that the legislator may have acted out of a general sense of social graciousness. The fact is that, of his own volition, the senator loaned him the book. Franklin, cleverly, further inhibited any attribution to social grace when he wrote to make a point of just what a favor the loan was. He thus underscored the fact that the behavior was a free and voluntary act, because favors are by definition done voluntarily. The new friendship followed easily from this action, although it may have been a chain of events that the senator had

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no intention of setting in motion. He had trapped himself in the dynamics of commitment. It is the volitional nature of activity that gives many motivation strategies their punch. Recall the situation, studied by Dr. Pallak, of Iowa residents and their commitment to conserve energy. Those who had voluntarily agreed to do so and had their agreements published did indeed use less energy. We can also see the importance of volition in a follow-up study conducted among Illinois homeowners. In early 1974, residents were asked to describe what they had done by way of conservation during the 1973 energy crisis. After they had finished they were given lists and asked to identify the reasons for their actions. Some received a list of personal reasons such as “felt it was my responsibility” or “I have always tried to conserve.” Others received a list that reminded them of the situational or personal constraints of conservation, such as “the costs of energy were too great” or “the 55 mph speed law had to be obeyed.” Thus some of the individuals were made to feel personal responsibility for what they had done to conserve energy; others were led to attribute their behavior to circumstantial pressures. The effect was dramatic. Those who were made to feel personally involved later planned to use less energy even after the “crisis” had passed. A follow-up study is

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currently being run in Princeton to measure exactly how much energy such individuals will save. Heightening an employee’s sense of personal responsibility is of course one means for channeling his energies in desired directions. American organizations traditionally underplay this. But some do not. Companies in the United States owned and managed by Japanese often are run on the general principles used in Japan. Although the Japanese style of management has been interpreted as a familar paternalism, it is really a vigilant effort to get workers to participate voluntarily and take personal responsibility for the activities that happen. They accomplish this through public face-to-face meetings during which each person’s role is painstakingly outlined. The Southwestern Ohio Bell Telephone Company recently attempted a systematic approach to making the individual’s role in the company’s affairs more salient. Employees in small groups witness a simulated news broadcast of the company’s troubles, up to the ultimate point at which things get so bad that the company goes out of business. The employees walk away from the telecast asking what they can do to keep the end from coming. The company claims to have saved millions of dollars by running the program.

GIMMITMENT~ AND MYTHS SUSTAIN ACTION

THAT

The power of commitment in shaping attitudes stems from the fact that individuals adjust their attitudes to fit the situations to which they are committed. It is what makes behavior self-sustaining. You act. You believe your action was valuable, worthwhile, desirable. You act again, renewing the belief. In time, without realizing it, you have

made a myth; your sense of veracity and value has been merged into the pattern of action. The myths sustains the action, and the action sustains the myth. Myths are a blessing-although, we hasten to add, a mixed blessing. Organizations could hardly get any work done if it were not for myths. They develop to justify, certify, and legitimate most of our activities. The psychiatric personnel of large-scale mental hospitals, for instance, generally hold to an ideology-or myth, if you will-that mental illness is attributable to physical causes. The ideology is both disputable and disputed, but it is a necessary one for those managing very large patient loads, with only enough time and resources to administer drugs as therapeutic treatment. More leisurely psychoanalysts in private practice, by contrast, adhere to an ideology about the psychological and social basis of mental problems, thus sustaining their involvement and that of their patients in intensive, longterm personal analysis. One significance of myths lies in justifying actions that otherwise might appear senseless and meaningless. Consider the difIicult business of selecting a candidate for a position in th e organization or of promoting one over another. The persons are as a rule either so similar to one another or so completely different from one another that any attempt at comparing them is a logical absurdity. This is particularly true for the more undefinable higher positions of an organization, such as the president or chief executive officer. Most candidates are obviously qualified. We could probably make as good a decision by a random toss of a coin. But one does not approach such decisions flippantly. Instead we assert that the choice made is the best choice that could have been made; that the prospects for the company

are better under the new CEO than ever before. The fact that these same statements were made in the past, that they could be made with equal legitimacy about the rejected candidates, is never considered. Why not? Because it would not make sense to say it does not matter who is chosen. It is supposed to matter; the myth is that it does matter. Without this myth we would not invest much authority into those who are chosen. And that would make a difference for an organization. Myths develop most frequently to make sense of the sacrifices we make when we act with little obvious benefit. As Kenneth Boulding has perceptively noted: We resist threats to our own identity. Consequently, it is easy to get locked into an identity that may demand too much sacrifice. Sacrifice creates sacredness. . . . Good money is often thrown after bad, but does not necessarily redeem it. One gets a depressing feeling sometimes that people who are most admired by mankind and who are regarded as its heroes are precisely those who have created the maximum amount of human misery. Those who have demanded sacrifice, the prophets and conquerors, revolutionaries and visionaries are those who created the great phyla of human history. Those who have made things a little better for little people-the traders, the producers, the inventors, even the bankers-have no monuments and receive no eulogies.

Most organizations require some sacrifices, actions without apparent benefit. And most of these actions require similar

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justification. For without justification they lose their credibility, and without credibility only a fool would continue them. Social psychologist Lloyd Strickland once conducted an insightful experiment about the justification for human actions. He had a supervisor check on the work performance of two subordinates and manipulated conditions so that the supervisor had to spend more of his time watching one than the other. The actual performances of the subordinates were controlled and virtually identical. But when the supervisor was asked to evaluate the two employees, he reported that the one he watched was untrustworthy and needed to be supervised closely to get any work out of him. This is clearly a myth and a useful one. The time spent watching the subordinate could only make sense to the supervisor if he thought it was instrumental to the subordinate’s performance. In this case, because the experimenter randomly assigned the supervisor to one or another of the employees, such a belief is particularly striking. It must be much easier to develop such beliefs in organizations in which the allocation of a supervisor’s time is itself based on a presumption of a need for his time. Jacob Weisberg, sales manager for the Germicide Division of West Chemical Products, realized the self-deceptions involved in being a manager and asked himself why sales managers spent almost 100 percent of their time with the 80 percent of the sales force that brought in only 20 percent of the sales

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volume. Why don’t they spend the time with those who bring in the bucks? Mr. Weisberg’s answer: Because uppermost in the minds of those managers was the desire to turn the men around. The typical manager in this situation hired salesmen with a world of expectations. And when the expectations are not realized, his own skills as a manager were being challenged. He had to do something about their performance. If he couldn’t, what kind of manager was he? The myths that sustain organizational activities are not usually considered to be myths. They are seen as evidential matters. Managers pride themselves on their attention to the bottom line, a phrase that has taken on such an aura in our culture that its invocation sounds like an audit itself. However, if we actually inquire whether a firm evaluates the effects of its programs and procedures, nine times out of ten the answer is no, accompanied with a quizzical expression that asks why we should raise the question. Fred Luthans, a management professor at the University of Nebraska, once surveyed the top 1,000 corporations of the United States as to how they use job enrichment programs. When he asked about the impact of these programs, he heard about gains in production, satisfaction, and profitability. But when he asked whether any formal or informal assessments had been made of the programs, he was told that only a handful had been made. The designers and implementers of the programs, perhaps not unintentionally, were content to rely on a scattering of anecdotal evidence. In many ways, evidence that something is working is probably less important than the belief that it is working. For it is the belief that sustains the activity, not the evidence. Evidence may serve to strengthen the

conviction that something is working; still, it is the belief that sustains the pursuit. Indeed, we suspect that it is for this reason that organizations and organizers rarely undertake reality testing. The costs of doing so are too great. And this does not mean the dollar costs. It means the costs of finding out that a good deal of the time it matters little what one does for the outcomes one gets. The important thing is to do something and to have everyone affected believe that what is being done is the right thing to do. As Max Weber suggested in his analysis of bureaucracy, the appearance that something is right and proper to do legitimates doing it and sustains the efforts. That actions need to be sustained in the absence of evidence that they contribute something is well known to firms engaged in commercial research and development. The drug manufacturer Merck and Company made its fortune from two drugs that were discovered almost by accident more than ten years ago-methyldopa for hypertension and indomethacin for arthritis. For the next ten years, Merck invested some $800 million in new drug research, and year after year it showed no results. Nothing. But after each year of disappointment, it still came up with a budget for new drug research. The firm was not happy about this; it replaced the chairman in 1976. But it did not stop trying, despite the lack of evidence to suggest it was getting them anywhere. And hope lives forever at Merck. When the new chairman, John Horan, took over, he said he expected the company to break out of its doldrums in a big way. Thus, with no evidence that investments of $800 million had any payoff, Merck’s managers roll up their sleeves and get right back to it.Why? Because they know one thing without any evidence at all: If thev do not look, thev

certainly will not find a new drug that will support their search for the next ten years.

SUPPORT AND SATISFACTION

Because the actions that people take voluntarily lead them to develop beliefs that justify and sustain their involvement and then commit them to these beliefs, one of the most fruitful uses of commitment is to obtain support for organizational ends and interests. The most common approach is to have employees or other interest groups participate in the management and formation of organizational policies. It is a common managerial style with many forms. Participation may involve only conversations between supervisors and subordinates or it may take more elaborate forms of solicited advice: employee feedback, suggestion systems, assignment of persons to task groups or advisory committees and boards, or selection of individuals for the board of directors. Whatever the specific form, the critical ingredients are that a person be clearly identified as participating in the program or activity and be publicly committed to doing so. For this reason, the office suggestion box does not contribute much to commitment since it is too anonymous to be taken seriously by anyone, including those who deposit their gems of wisdom. Participation in an activity or a

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group is coopting. It coopts an individual’s support and satisfaction. It constrains the individual’s attitudes and expressed beliefs regarding the activity or the group. And it does this because the most salient implication of participating in something is that the person wanted to support the activity, did so, and accepted it as valuable. Otherwise, why participate? Consider Senator Russell Long’s recent endorsement of Louis Kelso’s ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) in a speech to a group of tax experts: “It is better than Geritol . . . it will increase productivity . . . improve labor relations . . . make our concept of freedom prevail over those who don’t agree with us.” Senator Long’s solution for tired organizational blood is one of many recommendations posed in recent years to enhance employee commitment and involvement with their employing organizations. Sometimes the recommendations work. One firm that installed an ESOP in 1972, a former LTV subsidiary, distributed 173,000 shares to its 6,500 employees, thus involving them in its management and capital structure. While the firm showed less

turnover and absenteeism, the most important indicator of the effect this action had was the substantial increase in the sale of Tshirts with the E-System logo to employees and their families. Can we imagine walking around the barbecue pit breasted with the firm name saying nasty things about it? Participation undercuts opposition and objection. When this is true, goals are more likely to be accomplished. Involving persons or groups in the design of a project or policy ensures their support. Their hand leaves its imprint not only on the design but on them. They see it as a good plan-workable; after all, they recommended it. Were this not true, they would have to confront the question of why they had settled on a course of action that was unrealistic and couldn’t be accomplished. But having participated, they do their best to make it work. One of the common uses of participation is to undercut opposition by interest groups. Objections to a current policy can be effectively nullified by inviting the opposition group to participate in formulating its replacement. Whether a new policy can or will be developed is not as important as having one that is supported as the best possible

“Partic&ation undercut. opposition and objection. When this fi true, goals are more likeb to be accomplished Involving persons or groups in the design of a project or policy ensurestheir support. Their hand leaves itj imprint not only on the de&n 74

but on them. ”

policy under the circumstances. Opposition left on its own is evidence that the policy is not the best. It is thus frequently necessary to involve those who otherwise might contest the plan. Pitney-Bowes, one of the few American companies that has institutionalized employee participation in management, faced this situation in its 1972 jobholders meeting with top management. Magdalin Conning, a financial-training coordinator at Pitney-Bowes’s Stamford headquarters, spoke out and criticized the company for its poor use of women employees. Eighty percent of the customer account jobs were going to women and only 13 percent of the management positions. Rather than getting flustered at the outrage, the company’s president immediately relieved Ms. Conning of her normal duties and appointed her to head a special task force to examine the role of women at the firm. By this move, a potential source of dissatisfaction was converted into a formally assigned support for the organization. This is not to question the company’s sincerity about affirmative action; indeed, Pitney-Bowes later published the task force’s recommendations in its employee newspaper. Further, the importance of such participation has little to do with whether the solicited suggestions are used. The important aspect is rather in the effect of participation on those who participate. Their role as designer of policy, advicegiver, member of a board places them in a position that identifies them with the organization’s interests and that is incompatible with not supporting the organization. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a social scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, has described how many organizations have coopted a critical employee by appointing him or her the organization’s affirmative action officer. By formally designating a position

as being responsible for affirmative action, and by filling it with the most respected and vocal representative of the “opposition,” the firm removes critical voices from the “outside” -where they can get into newspapersto the “inside’‘-where they become “proprietary information” of the organization. Once on the inside, the position holder easily becomes wrapped up with justifying and maintaining his position: He or she ends up supporting the organization rather than opposing it. Substantial changes, when seen within the context of and from the point of view of the organization, become “difficult under the circumstances,” a conviction less easily arrived at by “outsiders.” Most participation programs work in the same way. They are devices for informing the individuals from whom support is needed of the constraints facing the organization and for obtaining their commitment to operate within those constraints. It is important that this be done. Opposition is usually opposition only because it ignores or is unaware of the constraints the insider-managers perceive as being critical. Inviting someone into the situation also invites them to accept the premises of the situation-and thus to plan within the same constraints that they may have previously opposed. Consider one of the best known participation programs-the Scanlon Plan. Most of the programs that go under that name do not recognize the genius of the man who created the first one for an obscure steel company in Ohio in the 1930s. The company was about to go bankrupt because of high costs and growing losses. Joseph N. Scanlon, one-time boxer, cost accountant, and millworker, was then president of the local union, and he did not want to see his members thrown into the breadlines with the rest of depressed America. As an accountant, he realized how costs affect profits 75

and how well-conducted day-to-day activities can produce profits. As an open hearth steelmaker, he also realized there were alternative strategies for reducing costs. And he knew that if workers’ ideas about how to do the work were applied, with management’s permission, they might just stop the problem of draining costs. Scanlon discussed his ideas with the company’s president. They arranged to have committees of labor and management convened at the level of the lowest operating units of the organization to solicit employees’ suggestions about how efficiency could be increased, production costs reduced, and waste eliminated. The committees met on a regular basis, discussing plans and then implementing them. Scanlon’s scheme worked. Costs dropped. Profits rose. And employees got bonuses. And with all of this, a new social invention was borne-to entrance and intimidate generations of managers. But what many overlooked was that the plan worked in this case because everyone participating in it accepted the premise of the situationthat efficiency and cost cutting were the appropriate goals. The important effect of the participation scheme was that it created a commitment to these premises. Avoiding

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the bandwagon

The fact that Scanlon’s scheme for employee participation worked has in some ways become its most regrettable outcome. It has led to a generalization that “participation works! ” And in so doing, it has led people away from considering whv it works. The situations facing organizations are specific situations, not general ones. In Scanlon’s steel company, the situation was a cost problem in an economic environment that could not tolerate costs. Costs are re-

lated to profits in such circumstances, and because the individuals were committed to solving problems about costs, the profits inevitably followed. To generalize, as many have, by saying, “participative management is profitable,” is a severe form of stupidity. Behaviors profit individuals and organization through their detailed effects, not as abstractions. And the benefits or disadvantages of commitments are no less through the detailed effects of their existence. For this reason, one must always be careful in selecting the behavior to which an individual is being committed. Sometimes we commit an individual to behavior that has implications we later find undesirable. The fault in these cases, however, lies not with commitment per se but with our own lack of understanding about the situation. Consider how a supervisor might handle a person who absents himself rather frequently from work. You might think from what we have said about commitment that the supervisor should make the person feel responsible for his behavior or should disclose the absenteeism to his peers. And you might think that by increasing his commitment, you would be solving the problem of his absenteeism. If you think that, however, you have not understood what we have said about commitment and its effects. While it would be quite easy to point out a person’s responsibility for not coming to work, doing so may have the unintended effect of increasing his future absence. The employee’s absenteeism implies that the organization has characteristics: A person is absent because there is something about the organization that needs to be avoided. If you make a person feel responsible for being absent, then you also place him in the position of having to justify why he was absent. He must create a myth to make sense of his own behavior. And because the

absences are obviously unacceptable to the employer, the employee finds himself justifying the behavior by finding something wrong with the organization or with his job. He may find himself saying, “I hate that job and that is why I did not go in today.” And soon enough, he will hate it. His absences will become easier; the behavior sustains the myth, and the myth sustains the behavior. To avoid the bandwagon effect and the trite grandiloquent banners of “Commitment works!” one must give painstaking attention to the details of the situations that are involved in any commitment. Commitment always works. The real question is does it work for you or against you. And making that determination is your responsibility, not that of the behavioral scientists who developed the knowledge about how commitment works.

ADVICE

FOR MANAGERS

Although situational details are important in developing any employee-commitment program, we can offer advice on some situations most managers confront at one time or another. Situation 1.: Initiating new programs. One common situation is that of committing individuals to pursue a new program or objective for the organization. The manager wants someone to be committed to the program, Those involved with the -program either agree with it or at least have not voiced disagreement. But they do have objections to the program. What does the manager do? Does he try to persuade them and overcome their objections? Does he try to show them how wrong their point of view is? No! To do so, only .places them in the position of having to justify a position that is being attacked. We know .from several experiments

that when individuals committed to a position are attacked for it, they become more entrenched. Indeed, martyrs are made in just this way. The way a manager should handle such a situation is to not allow a person to become committed to his objections in the first place. He should encourage the person to outline his thoughts about the new program but not allow these objections to be made in his presence or with his knowledge. If he does so, he will become a party to the employee’s expectations of failure. Instead, the manager should let the person keep track of the problems with the new program on his own and should not ask for a report of the problems he thinks he has located. The manager should tell the person that if he locates a problem, he should then handle it, solve it, and keep track of the solution. After an employee has done this-more than once, perhaps-then ask for a report of how well the new program is doing, if you feel you need one. The important point is that the manger should communicate only expectations that he thinks the program is workable and that the employee can make it workable. The employee will then be committed to making it workable, and the difficulties that normally arise-real or imagined-will be dealt with rather than accepted as evidence that the program is not workable. Some managers may not want to give their employees such discretion in implementing a new program. They may worry that something will go wrong. That is fine. Managers should worry about whether something will go wrong. But the worry has nothing to do with commitment; it has to do with their ability to hire competent employees, and that is their responsibility. If they act on their worry, the managers will be committing their employees to an expec-

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tation of failure. By outlining all the things that could go wrong with a new program and by constantly discussing them, the manager is essentially setting up a situation where both he and the employee become committed to accepting failure. Sitzration 2.: Employee satisfaction with a task. This topic is too important to

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deal with briefly. But there is one aspect of jobs that is general enough to be discussed. All jobs, no matter how glorious or demeaning, have both good and bad features. The writer who spends his day penning erotic tales, even literary ones, gets a sore back and uncomfortable lacerations. The day laborer who breaks his back carrying the troughs of wet cement to the master bricklayer amuses himself with fantasies about the onlookers peeping through the cracks in the site fence. All jobs are good and bad. The important thing that determines whether a person is satisfied or not with those jobs is not the presence of the good and bad itself but the way the person focuses on those qualities. A person may come to terms with the bad features and embrace the good. One of the things that determines whether he does or not is the person’s identification with the task and his commitment to it. Part of what inhibits a person’s commitment to a task is the extrinsic and instrumental basis of the work. If people are constantly reminded of the money they are paid and the benefits they receive in exchange for their work, they are put in the position of thinking of themselves as working for those things. As a consequence they do not evaluate the job on the basis of the intrinsic features of the task itself. It becomes a chore, an obstacle, a means to some other end. It is boring, because “It is only a job. . . and I’m only doing it for the bread.” There is experimental evidence that a task is per-

ceived as less interesting when its instrumental value is made salient. Individuals seem to identify less with such tasks and see fewer reasons for doing them in terms of their value to them. The task is not something the person is doing for its own sake but something that he is using to get something else. The commitment to the task is thus low and so is the person’s evaluation of the task. That the instrumental value of a task inhibits commitment to it does not mean one should pay people less for the work they do. There is no evidence to support such a proposal. It does mean, however, that the salience of pay should be diminished. For when pay is salient-or other instrumental and external purposes are salient-it becomes the dominant reason for the work. This in itself may not be consequential, but when the usual undesirable aspects of a work situation arise, there will be nothing more desirable about the work to offset them. The lesson here is that a style of supervision that barks about how much the employee is being paid to do a job only instills a climate that makes pay the only reason for doing anything. From this, individuals may develop a sense of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay and give that much and not an ounce more. Situation 3.: Coopting opinions in group meetings. Individuals will frequently

commit themselves to positions and courses of action without being entirely aware that they are. This is common in group meetings, often convened for just such a purpose. People employing this form of cooptation make use of “we” as an inclusive device in developing a consensus. Thus the chairperson of the meeting might say, “I think we can all agree,” and from that point go to state a position that those attending had not thought about before. The committing aspect of this situation comes from sitting quietly by

without objection as the statement is being made. A more subtle form of the same approach is when a member of a committee in open discussion includes some other member in his opinions and speaks from his mouth as though it were the other person’s opinion too. The standard phrase is, “Well, as you indicated, John. . . .” And zap! There John is, being coopted to a point of view. A public statement regarding your position is being made, and while it is clear at the time that it comes from someone else, if you sit idly by, it will end up being taken by allincluding yourself-as your opinion. In some cases, a manager might want to practice these stratagems to enhance a group consensus within a meeting. On the other hand, he may wish to avoid being so easily taken in by his peers or superiors. One way of avoiding this commitment is to carefully segregate spheres of personal responsibility. When the familiar “I think we can all agree . . .” comes, take a deep breath and say, “You might be right, but let us just see. . . . I, for one, would like to hear the points of view of others.” This may not always work or it may brand the manager as an outlandish sort of person. But these are bearable consequences when the purpose of a meeting is to find out the alternatives rather than to form a consensus around one point of view. The general approach to avoiding being unnecessarily associated with another person’s beliefs is to explicitly distance yourself from the other person by clearly outlining your individual responsibilities and differentiating them from those of the other person. The strategy of distancing and segregating personal responsibilities plays an important role in reducing other persons’ commitments when they are no longer desirable from the manager’s own point of

view. If someone disagrees with the manager’s view and becomes locked into the position, that is, committed, a common response is to attack them for their position and to try to convince them that the “official” position is better. This usually has mixed results. Attacking a person only invites him to submit convincing justifications. And the more attacked, the more the justifications become personal myths-beliefs that are completely insubstantiatable, such as, “I wanted to,” “I like doing that,” or, as in the case with absences, “I hate your stinking job.” One way of loosening a person’s commitment to a position is to provide him with substantial external justifications for his position. In one experimental study of this, Nixon supporters were given many justifications for voting for him, but after that they were given recent news articles about the Watergate affair. The result was that they then became more willing to sign an “impetition. And in another peach Nixon” study, we are trying to have people who report substantial absenteeism from work to attribute the absences to extrinsic and situational circumstances, such as the severe winter weather. Our expectation is that this will eventually lead to a decrease in their absences. Whether a manager wants to increase or decrease a person’s commitment to a position or goal, his tools are the same: publicity, irreversibility, and volition. These three characteristics of behavior create the conditions of commitment and as such they represent important sources of social influence that organizations use to shape the behavior of their participants. But this is the process of commitment. The effects that it will bring either to individuals or organizations are entirely another matter, having to do with the specific characteristics of the

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behavior involved and the implications such behavior-has for future behavior.

that

ent is and the future wiil be different. Thus the concern with individual fulfillment and with participation in organizational management.

But, if you have read carefully what I have said about the processes of commit-

CONCLUSION

It seems appropriate to end somewhere near where we began. Ours is an age that seeks solace in ideas of individual freedom and potency in human affairs. The carchphrases that segregate us so well from the past express our belief in the power of integrating the conflicting interests of the individual and the organized aggregate-participation and fulfillment. Commitment, which in recent years has entered more and more into discussions of worker motivation, we think is just a vehicle for this. We characterize the past, the turbulent beginnings of the industrial era, as a period in which the individual was used merely for the purposes of the organization. And we dislike this approach and comfort ourselves by thinking that the pres-

SELECTED

There is not too. much on commitment as it re-

lates to organization. Many of the ideas discussed here are elaborated on in “Commitment and the Control of Organizational Behavior and Belief,” a chapter I wrote for publication in New Directions in Organizational Behavior (St. Clair Press 1977). Readers may also refer to Charles A. Kiesler’s The Psychology of Commitment: Experiments Linking Behavior to Liking (Academic Press,1971) for a more thorough

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theoretical and experimental treatment of the commitment process. Several recent articles have appeared in Administrative Science Quar-

ment, about how it comes about and where

it leads, you will be less sanguine about the future relationship of the individual to the organization. You will recognize that commitment is a strikingly powerful and subtle form of coopting the individual to the point

of view of the organization. And in characterizing this age it may be more accurate to see it as a form of totalitarianism that Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, so perceptively envisioned forty years ago. As he put it, “The secret of happiness and virtue is liking what you’ve go to do. All

conditioning

aims at that: making people like

their inescapable social destiny.” The tools are there; use them as

you will.

BIRLIOGRAPHY

terly that have outlined a quite different perspective on commitment, namely one that sees commitment as the result of worker satisfaction with an organization. This point of view is also available in Bruce Buchanan’s recentarticle, “To Walk an Extra Mile: The Whats, Whens, and Whys of Organizational Commitment” (Or@nizational Dynamics, Spring 1975, pp. 67-80). Editor William Dowling recently outlined the role of commitment in consensus management in organization in “Consensus Management at Graphic Controls” (Organization Dynamics, Winter 1977, pp. 22-47).