Bureaucratic Group Experience

In contrast to the chaotic group where effective leadership is for the most part absent, participants in the bureaucratized group control their anxieties by creating a socially defensive system aimed at eliminating adverse group experience and containing anxiety. The result is the familiar hierarchical organization structure and accompanying policies and procedures, rules and regulations that regulate work and member interactions. Bureaucratic hierarchies provide for nonthreatening leadership where the leader’s power and authority are carefully circumscribed and preferably exercised in an impersonal manner. The leader must, in effect, play by the rules of the organization or risk rejection and even termination.

These organizational attributes, it is hoped, will provide group members the comforting illusion of stability, predictability, equality and dependability. Personal autonomy that abounds in the chaotic group experience is discouraged. Control of feelings, beliefs and actions is the primary task. Productivity paradoxically may be of secondary importance. However, unlike chaotic groups that produce little other than anxiety and an occasional but uncoordinated flare of creativity, bureaucratized groups are able to accomplish work by following the policies and procedures. Readers will no doubt possess the deepest familiarity with this kind of group and organizational experience and further elaboration of its attributes is not necessary.

Reliance upon the bureaucratic hierarchical approach to designing organizations and groups is not without its difficulties and dysfunctions. Many have noted that bureaucracies have difficulty in learning from experience and adjusting to new circumstances, and they encourage dependence on the part of their members (Blau and Meyer, 1956; Jacoby, 1977 and Merton et al., 1952). This solution to controlling group process, however, also often fails to provide its members a permanent solution to controlling their anxiety. Feelings of oppression and alienation readily emerge that threaten security and control. Selfindividuation remains undesirable as was the case in the chaotic group. These experiences are especially likely to occur among those who are most apt to selfdifferentiate either by offering new ideas or perhaps outperforming others (Allcorn, 1991). Czander (1993) also points out that while the espoused practice appears to be one of professional objectivity, actual experience is different. “ Rewards and punishments are used as motivational instruments and are supposed to be based on ‘objective’ evaluations of performance. However, this process is rarely objective; instead it is political, which precipitates conflict and adversarial relations between superior and subordinate” (p. 119). Problems such as these readily lead to a greater reliance upon bureaucratic control in the belief if “we just do it right (according to the policies and procedures), everything will be all right” and by extension our anxious feelings will be allayed.

Herein lies the psychological significance of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Employees experience the liberating abandonment of personal responsibility for their thoughts, feelings and actions and simultaneously must defend themselves against their distressing experience of submission and self-annihilation where praise and rewards are, it is hoped, sufficient to compensate for these losses of self-integrity to the system of control. These and other tensions inherent within this type of workplace experience may well lead to feelings that things could be better.