(Note: This was originally posted on April 30, 2008 and has been re-posted as a new thread to facilitate ease of response. JA)


Hello, everyone:

Lili Kraus was a Hungarian-born classical pianist who enjoyed an internationally renowned career until just a few years before her death in 1986 at the age of 83. (In-Tune Productions, 2002). Her career as a wife, performing artist and mother was interrupted during World War II by a four-year political incarceration in a subterranean Indonesian prison and later prisoner of war camps, where she was forced to do manual labor (Mach, 1980).

Talking was forbidden in the underground prison, so Lili Kraus sang – ignoring threats of beatings that never came.

She missed her family and her music and wondered whether the daily drawing and carrying of water would damage her hands beyond recovery. She is quoted by Mach: "What really ate me up was the longing for my music and my family. I could never decide which anguish was more tormenting; however, I was consumed by the desire to sit down at the piano and play and play. This longing almost drove me mad."

She responded silently but passionately, mentally resurrecting and rememorizing every composition she had ever played. Again from Mach: "I worked so hard at doing this that scores and technique, which seemed to have been buried many fathoms deep, now appeared so real, so present, that I knew that if I were seated before a piano, I could play pieces I hadn't practiced since childhood, and in doing so discover new wonders that never seemed so apparent before."

Mrs. Kraus' opportunity to do that came when she was transferred to a different prison and commanded by her captors to play at Christmastime for the other prisoners. She recalled: "It was as if I could play anything and everything ever known to man -- what merciful madness. It seemed all I had to do was make the effort to recall the piece. It was then, too, that I realized the strength of my fingers and that the forced labor had helped rather than hurt them."

This is called "resistance," and we see it in organizations.

Resistance is not inherently good or bad, but it can lead to outcomes of either interpretation. At its best, it can be a source of inner strength. Lili Kraus used it to find a way to sustain herself. In fact, she said that it was from her time of imprisonment, that she was truly born as an artist. But resistance can also lead to tragedy -- for example, when disgruntled students, employees or citizens barge into their schools, work places or city council meetings and open fire. Sadly, many more examples of the latter rather than the former come to mind.

For the individual or for the organization, resistance can lead to positive or negative outcomes; but the point being made here is that it is something to recognize and be aware of as we engage in our careers.

Here are some examples:
-- The famous Hawthorne studies of the 1920s uncovered a phenomenon that eventually came to be known as "restriction of output." Described by Schein (1980), workers were "colluding to produce at a level below their capacity." This was a norm arrived at by the group. It resulted in a production levels sufficient to satisfy management but far below the level the group could have produced. Anyone who violated the group norm was considered a "rate buster."

-- I heard a story a couple of years ago about a young engineer who discovered this for himself. He was assigned to do time-and-motion studies during his first year of employment and was astonished to hear from one worker, in particular, who adamantly stopped when his output reached a certain level. It’s appropriate here to note that this resistance was occurring in a workplace where time-and-motion studies were still being done. They have been widely criticized for being dehumanizing; and their creator, Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management and Taylorism, was called before the U.S. House of Representatives in 1911 to defend his system of management. (Morgan, 1997).

-- Clerical employees who were forced to take on call center duties, which they experienced as stressful, created spaces for resistance by only pretending to be talking to customers, being slow to answer the phones, or by withholding information that the customer didn’t ask about but could have benefited from. (Knights & McCabe, 1998)

-- Morgan (1997) refers to E.B. Whyte’s Money and Motivation (1955) in alluding to factory workers who were able “to control their pace of work and level of earnings, even when under the close eye of their supervisors or of efficiency experts trying to find ways of increasing productivity.” Those same workers were also able to create the impression that they were working harder than they really were. They were also able to find ways of working faster and more efficiently when their supervisors weren’t watching.

Many more examples could be presented here; but I’m sure you get the idea and are already thinking of similar incidents encountered within your own career.

So, it seems, that the individual’s or the group’s ability to create spaces for resistance is always in play – and is a phenomenon that offers those at the top of a bureaucracy good reasons, other than worker well-being, to consider how their management practices might be encouraging employee resistance. As Morgan says (1997) “…humans are human, and the best-laid plans have a habit of turning in ways never intended by their creators. Formal organizations thus often become guided toward the achievement of informal ends, some of which may be quite contrary to the aims underlying the original design.”

The most compelling example that comes to mind here is something I read about a former CEO who routinely fired the lowest-performing 10 percent of his management staff each year. I won’t mention the name because the reference isn’t where I thought I could find it quickly; but many of you probably know to whom I’m referring. He’s quite controversial – and his proponents might argue that his results justified his ways -- i.e. “If it means the company is around the next year to do it all again, is that such a bad thing?”

But that’s a very short-sighted view.

It makes me shudder to think what kinds of opportunities for resistance that practice is creating – issues of organizational commitment, organizational citizenship and anti-citizenship, aside. If we continued on here into a discussion of boundary and closed and open systems theory, we could build the argument that an organization that engages in this kind of practice is soiling its own underwear and also putting the equivalent of hazardous waste into the environment in which it will do business in the future. That could lead us further to a discussion of what’s happening with bureaucratic organizations and whether they can really adapt in a way that contributes to what the world is becoming versus whether new organizational forms are the answer.

But enough for now. All of that is fodder for future commentary – as well as an invitation to hear the perspectives of others.

Anyone?

Till next week… All my best,
Jan

P.S. See also: A post about resistance from Stephanie.
Resistance can be useful


Primary References
In-Tune Productions. (2002). Artist’s biography: The Pittsburgh symphony chamber orchestra with pianist Lili Kraus. Pittsburgh/Kraus Accessed: April 27. 2008.

Knights, D. & McCabe, D. (1998). What happens when the phone goes wild?: Staff, stress and spaces for escape in a BPR telephone banking work regime. Journal of Management Studies, 35: 1630194.

Mach, E. (1980). Great contemporary pianists speak for themselves. New York: Dover.

Morgan G. (1997). Images of organization. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage.

Schein, E. (1980). Organizational psychology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.


Secondary References
Whyte, E.B. (1955). Money and Motivation. New York: Harper & Row.