workplace angst

I ran into something today that helped me make some sense of my Army experience so far. I just completed 3 years of active service, and though I still have not deployed, I feel like I've been in a war zone in some ways. People close to me know that I've spent most of my three years in a unit with a demanding operational tempo and a less than enjoyable organizational culture. I have run into a lot of peers from ROTC, OCS, and USMA that express similar frustration from other units they've seen, although most affirm that they have seen units where life and work were far more enjoyable and meaningful.

The multiple hypotheses of this article can be summarized in the following sentence:

Subordinates with high self-esteem and an internal locus of control experience decreased motivation and increased stress when their supervisor exercises coercive, perceived, legitimate, reward, expert and referent power.

(I think this means that subordinates with high self-esteem, who like to self-determine and influence others, are often stressed and demoralized by supervisors who use coercion, rewards, status, and even professional expertise to heavily influence their subordinates.)

This made sense to me, and it happens that the kind of leadership described here as stressful and demotivating to someone like me is the very kind of leadership most often displayed and valued in my organization, and possibly in the Army (the article differentiates between high and low self esteem, and internal and external locus of control--in both cases I identify myself with the former type of subordinate). To me, it doesn't really matter that my bosses usually emerge with a high estimate of me and of my work: the angst I carry most days is not worth even the highest praise. One day, I plan to work someplace where I don't constantly have to translate myself into an adverse organizational culture. But for the meantime, I've decided to extend my active service obligation by a few years, so I need to find a way to do that with less wheel-spinning. I am trying to identify some strategies to cope successfully and not lose my mind!

I'm not sure that all workplaces are fraught with these issues, but I imagine to some extent they exist anywhere. The real meat of the article begins on p. 362, and here is an interesting clip about control in the workplace, from which I removed all the cumbersome citations for easier reading:

"People have different beliefs about the factors responsible for what happens to them. Those with an internal locus of control (internals) view what happens to them as primarily under their own control, whereas those with an external locus of control (externals) view what happens to them as determined by factors outside themselves and beyond their control. ... internals are more likely than externals to be in managerial positions and to try to influence the behavior of others. In contrast, externals are more likely to accept attempts by others to influence them, and respond more positively to directive leadership style. Further, internals are more likely to take actions to cope with stress, whereas externals are more likely to endure rather than to act. Overall, internals tend to have a higher desire than externals for personal control in the workplace.

Given these differences between internals and externals, it is hypothesized that internals are generally less receptive to supervisor power than externals, especially to supervisor reward, coercive, legitimate, and referent power. Not only do internals have a tendency to obtain and exert personal control, but they also tend to resist attempts by others to influence them. Therefore, internals might need less supervision from their supervisors than externals and may even perceive the exercising of supervisory power as unnecessary and unwanted, which could lower their motivation and increase stress levels. It can be argued, however, that internals would be more receptive to the supervisor's expert power than externals. Given internals' tendency to perceive situations as controllable and their preference for taking constructive actions to resolve problems in the workplace, they are more likely to appreciate and make use of their supervisors' professional knowledge and expertise to solve problems and improve performance. As a result, internals are likely to react positively to high expert power of the supervisor, especially given their relatively stronger belief that good performance will lead to rewards."

A very interesting dichotomy, to say the least.

References

A. R. Elangovan, Jia Lin Xie. Effects of Perceived Power of Supervisor on Subordinate Stress and Motivation: The Moderating Role of Subordinate Characteristics. Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 20, No. 3 (May, 1999), pp. 359-373

pitter patter

I had the immense privilege today of accompanying a friend and coworker to her ultrasound. That we had to drive 2 hours to get to this appointment should tell you something about just how rural Louisiana can get--how long has ultrasound technology been around? Going in place of her husband, who was very disappointed that he could not get off work to accompany her, I was poised to get the video footage that would make him feel like he hadn't missed this irreplaceable event. (This is especially poignant for this couple, because this pregnancy is the first to successfully pass the first trimester, so this is a story of overcoming odds.)

From the first, tentative images of the baby wiggling around inside of my friend, I found myself referring oddly to this child as "it." Was "it" an alien, or an animal, that this pronoun was appropriate? Of course not, but I didn't know how else to relate. Still, I was captivated as we traced from one human feature to another. Spinal column, upturned nose, flexing ankles and fists... I was one creature beholding another, a new and still-forming life. And then, without warning, we moved to the baby's lower regions, where, prominently displayed, spread-eagle, between (already!) muscular legs was the mark of future manhood. From then on, it was not so hard to talk about hands and diaphragms--they were all his, and he was breathing, moving, living as we watched and held our breaths with anticipation.

Later that evening, with our small group bible study, we talked about how he will reorient the lives of his parents. In a sort of alien invasion, he will reprioritize and reorder the world as they know it, abolishing all notions of "his" and "hers" and "yours" and "mine," becoming the first thing that is totally "ours" for both mom and dad. We laughed about the ways he is already beginning that shift, making way for his arrival. Watch out world! We prayed the following portion of Psalm 139 as an appropriate prayer of thanks for the health and safety of this baby, and for the life given to each of us:

¹³For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother's womb.
¹⁴I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
¹⁶Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.

(from the New American Standard Bible)

becoming "normal"

I have been reading for my Masters in Education program, otherwise known as the MAT@USC. We talk about being sociotechnically literate, and the program is a good example of that, with all its multi-print/media sources and modes of conducting class online. An article by I would like to focus on by Miraca U. M. Gross introduces the central dialectic of identity construction for gifted students. She posits that there are two extremes for identity diffusion that many gifted students tend toward, but advocates a more integrated, socialized, and balanced view of gifted student identity (Gross, 1998). Gross contrasts George Bernard Shaw, who created a "dazzling array of masks" behind which to hide his giftedness, with Einstein and Cyril Joad, who seemed to remove themselves "gently but firmly from the obligations of social intimacy," believing that the "differences between [themselves] and the people with whom [they have] to associate are so much greater than the differences among them, that there is little hope of finding someone with similar values, or beliefs, or interests" (Gross, 1998, p. 8). I have often found myself straddling this line, and have been jealous of others who were better at role experimentation and creating glamorous masks for themselves, or who could get away with being reclusive and people were in awe of them for it. I always had a sense that there was something unhealthy in it, but I envied them because I wasn't any good at role playing or forswearing the company of people altogether. I envied them, but I didn't see a future for myself in their shoes, so I was stuck working out my identity in the context of the people left and right of me.

I was fortunate enough to have several schools and teachers who knew what to do with me, and I made friends with others who learned and developed much like I did in Honors, AP, and special elective classes. But there was always the reality in the hallways, at sports practice after school, even in orchestra or the school play, that not everyone was on the same page. In college it still surprised me to find that my genuine love of learning (I think we talked about the accompanying physiological arousal in the 518 class) was not shared by many of my classmates. I assumed that the love of learning was why you went to college, and yet they were surprised by my caffeinated persona following a good read or an essay test. Gross outlines this difference by saying that "one of the basic characteristics of the gifted is their intensity and an expanded field of their subjective experience" (Piechowski, 1991, p. 181 as quoted in Gross, 1998, p. 5).

Here is where the rubber continues to meet the road for me. In college, I became close friends with my roommate who by her own admission was not academically inclined whatsoever. We became close primarily because she was patient with me while I continued to be myself. I wove into our daily conversations about typical college girl things my reflections on what I was reading, listening to, experiencing in my classes and hobbies. I persevered when I noticed that she was losing interest, either by linking it to something I knew she was genuinely interested in or by giving myself permission to lose her interest--without taking it as a negative assessment of who I was. (I still employ this technique today with friends, bosses and coworkers in the Army, when our interests don't align.) To me, it was a better use of my "giftedness" than to cloister myself away from the women on my hall or prefer only fractured, pedantic relationships with other bookworms like myself. I had sought her out as a socially stabilizing force because I perceived, perhaps selfishly, that she could bring me into a world of relationships that I would otherwise struggle to cultivate on my own. In a sense, I sought her out because she was "normal."

As much as I loved learning, I wanted it to be relevant to the people I was meeting, and I did not want to be consumed by the isolation of my own academic ego and miss out on the pure, wreckless joy and adventure that college friendships could bring. My roommate did just that, introducing me to people I would have barely sought out or talked to otherwise. If I felt they were boring or shallow, it became my challenge to invite them into a deeper dialogue, which I instinctively knew they must have something to contribute to. That was when I stopped envying my more gifted friends and acquaintances who put on masks or withdrew from community. I was watching them become fit only for academia or niche interests, and I couldn't follow them there. I wanted my life to be lived in the arena, inviting others to realize their potential instead of entrenching or flaunting mine. I would like to say that at this point I was unequivocal about my self-acceptance and the social integration of my gifts; however, I recall on several occasions attributing my enjoyment of less intellectual company to the fact that I just wanted as intelligent as my more reclusive or flamboyant friends.

It is only for God (and my employers, perhaps) to know where I fall on the spectrum of giftedness: others are more gifted than I, certainly. The essential thing is that I have known for a long time that I am different than many of the people I run into in life. My moral sense was perhaps the first thing I noticed was heightened compared to many of my grade-school peers, then other acuities followed. This is a classic nature vs. nurture debate as well, which I do not want to explore at the moment--I only know that who/whatever is responsible for my giftedness, I am responsible for revealing the greatest good out of what I was given, for myself and for others. That my roommate could begin to sense this impulse in me--where others wrote me off as nerdy, ostentatious, or even insecure--is half of the miracle of relationship for someone like me. (That said, it still wasn't much fun when, using my normal vocabulary in daily conversation, people often gave me a hard time about using "big words" or being "too excited" about how my theology class related to my Emily Dickenson reading that week.)

Eventually, my roommate began to realize her own unexplored passion for learning, and as her awareness of herself increased, we continued to enjoy the great potential of friendship. I watched her go through a stage of isolation and loneliness as she began to differ from established norms she had taken for granted, and then to flourish as she painfully began to reintegrate herself into our social context as an emerging thinker. She always had an acute moral empathy for others, and she had an exceptional drawing and painting ability, but she had not necessarily been characterized as academically gifted. School continued to be a struggle for her, but she was now aware that substantive learning could occur in many other modes, and that this was attractive and important to her. I think this demonstrates why it would be a mistake to assume that all gifted kids should be kept from interaction with their "normal" peers. Given the right impetus and encouragement, gifted kids can help their peers unlock their own potential, and also benefit from the social interaction that implies.

Finally, most of us will have to work with some "normal" people in the course of our adult lives. My life in the Army has given me painful examples of this, where my analytical, compassionate, and creative impulses have earned me negative social ramifications more than once. Yet I am consistently given more challenging jobs and encouraged to pursue a military career. Someone gifted in the arts and humanities might miss the value in military culture and leadership styles. This can be counteracted to a point through self-reflection, reading the literary works of military thinkers to develop a warrior-scholar paradigm, and appreciating the art-and-science aspects of martial skills. Soldiers will surprise you with their ingenuity, their sometimes beautiful lightning reflexes, their intimate knowledge of equipment, and their logistical sense of the material world by which they live or die. Even the conformist camaraderie of military culture takes on its own life and artfulness from unit to unit, until it can be rightfully called in some cases esprit de corps. (I was so nerdy as to quote the British Romantics to myself while navigating my way through night forests with only my compass and map, to keep from panicking. Similarly, as a cadet, I couldn't march well until I conceptualized the movement as a dance, for which I had prior experience.) If it were not for these kinds of investigations, it would be easy for me to conclude that the people around me were stupid, unimaginative, or base, autocratic literalists. What I have had to perceive over time is that there are many forms of being gifted, and out of sheer necessity some are more valuable in my job than others.

In sum, our definitions of "gifted" and "normal" begin to warp as we place them in close proximity to one another. One realizes that the aim of every human being ought to be social and personal integration, rather than isolation or conformity in either extreme. That each person learns at any age to appreciate solitude and individual pursuits as valuable in and of themselves is vital to identity construction for anyone. In compliment to this, each must learn to appreciate the value of human community as inherently worth the cost, recognizing of course that some communities will always suit her interests and personal growth better than others.

References

Gross, M. (1998). The “me” behind the mask: Intellectually gifted students and the search for Identity. Roeper Review Feb 20 (3).

(-) invective

tell me
without tremors
your sine qua non sobbing--
don't offer
with clenched fists
a cold blanket to wrap up in
against the hurricane
unfurling inside
to wreck all arguments
and make flotsam
out of buoyancy.
spare me
the harsh sand settling--
burying our so-called waterloo
with
finality.

(Written as a perspective meditation from my husband's point of view. He has to put up with too many of my tirades about the Army lately. I think I saw this poem in his eyes this week, bent over the spaghetti he was making, as he asked if I could render the account of my horrible week "without invective.")

past tense: conjugating absence

Today I was talking to my masseuse, oddly enough, about some unpolished silver I have in a drawer, passed from my great grandmother through my mother, to me. We were talking about how tarnished silver has so many fascinating colors, it makes you not want to polish it. I think I feel some kind of compulsion to talk about meaningful, deep things with her because she represents a union of physical and spiritual well-being that can only be described as intentional and, of course, full of meaning. As a result I may force conversation sometimes, trying to appear integrated and whole, when I really come fractured, in knots, and adrift in the world. After all, what you pay a masseuse to do is clearly something you are at least partly missing in your normal daily routine. In my case, it is not a deprivation of human touch or visually appealing environment: I inhabit my office space like a home, changing the lighting and decor to suit, and at home my husband is a constant physical presence that comforts and calms. I come for relaxation, which is too easily left by the wayside even at home, where I can find things to work on and improve when I should be resting, meditating, praying, or otherwise integrating the spiritual and the physical. Talking about the unpolished silver, I started to say that "my mom always says" I should polish it before using it (she never did, because she rarely used it, of course). I caught myself, but didn't know how to conjugate the verb "to say." Clearly, she said it once, or maybe more. She does not say it any longer. Or does she? Every time I replay a memory of her speaking to me, does she "say on"? Does she have speech in my thoughts that continues beyond her lack of vocal chords? Certainly she lives in other capacities, too--in the thoughts of every one who ever knew her and calls her to mind from time to time. Can I say that she says anything--or is all her voice in the past tense, for me? Whatever life she now has is paradoxical: she lives and she does not live, speaks and speaks no more. Am I allowed to say that she still speaks to me, or is that admission insane? There are a handful of songs that reduce me to weeping on my knees in church, because I cannot hear them without her voice leading the singers. I hear it like an echo: faint, but undeniably present. I admit that I am still not very well acquainted with the grammar of loss.

lights go out

When I have had to go into the woods alone, especially at night, it has usually been difficult. The Army prides itself on building mental toughness, but sometimes just walking down that darkened hallway is hard enough for me. I have forsworn taking the garbage out at night, since the dumpster area reminds me of a scene from a horror movie. I let my husband brave the zombies. My fear of the "I know not what" in the woods, my "Pan-ic," (a great etymology from the mythical Greek god Pan, that whimsically dangerous forest-dweller) gets the better of me more often than I would like. Is it a function of loneliness--the feeling of vulnerability that comes of not having anyone in your corner? This might explain how hard I had to work to control my fear when the Army would send me into the night woods to navigate my way to various points during training. I would do anything--typically bribe a small dog on the premises with food, or mumble aloud to myself--to keep from remembering how alone I was in the woods. I tried to ennoble it by calling it an exercise in solitude: just me, my compass, my map, and the stars... I may have been deluding myself. After all, it didn't really help: I now will do anything to avoid walking the trash out at night! Or is it a kind of socialized laziness--the settled comfort of knowing I can send my husband out in the dark, allowing me to keep the luxury of my most vivid fears, rather than face them? I don't seem to be any less jumpy when it's just the two of us camping. The only time this night paranoia seems to take a back seat is when I am with a large group of people.

When I walk through the woods with my children at night, to help them find a place to pee or to show them the constellations, will they sense my shallow breathing and darting eyes, and wonder how on earth I used to be a Soldier? Or, will they think I am their Amazon protectress, and wonder why they themselves don't feel braver in the world? I hope they do neither. I often wish I were not so afraid of my own imagination.

jack the ripper houdini

Today I'm in awe of my fish. An African lemon cichlid, he is such a beautifully colored, inquisitive little predator. We can't agree on a name for him, so he is alternately Jack and Houdini: the latter because when he was smaller, he once got stuck in the neck of a green soda bottle in his tank, and went in and out of panic mode for almost an hour while figuring out how to escape. But any sympathy for him is short-lived when you consider that he has repeatedly attacked and finally eaten two other blue cichlids of a sister species, as well as a plecostomus. In every case, we were on vacation, and he truly "left no trace." We finally have a pleco who's bigger than he is, so I hope he'll be safe when we leave for the holidays. And then there is Buddha, a small, polka-dotted pleco who's been with him since the beginning, but who is always given over to a kind of trans-existential meditation. I think Jack thinks Buddha so strange and un-fishly that he leaves him alone. Buddha has been known to immerse himself in profound studies of otherness--transforming himself into a hermit crab, and then a barnacle for weeks on end. I can't put any more shells in the tank, or we'll never see him again: when I finally got him out of the barnacle last year, his face was kind of smashed and he didn't look right for a few days. We were hoping the other pleco would teach him how to be one, but no dice. He sometimes rummages around the back of the tank along the ground, but mostly stays totally still, having given up all worldly pursuits in favor of enlightenment. All the while his buddha-belly gets rounder and rounder. Maybe he has a tumor. I don't know, but I feel responsible for them--for their little world, which I in a sense created. I am their sustainer for all practical purposes, and I hate it when there is hunger and death and toxic chemicals and bouts of uneighborliness. I know that I anthropomorphize Jack, especially. He is so yellow and so stuck on himself, he's hard to ignore. He's been swimming up and down all day today, exploring the new dimensions of the tank after I gave back an inch and a half of water that had evaporated. There is a water lily I put in there that just won't grow beyond a few sprigs, because he constantly eats at its roots. Far from paradise, but oh, to be just a fish sometimes. Things are quieter by virtue of being louder, underwater.