CHAOTIC WORK EXPERIENCE

There are many occasions where group and organization experience can seem to be chaotic and contain a sense of confusion, dread, fear, threat and distressing personality clashes that include not-so-hidden struggles for power and ascendancy. The old phrase “too many bulls in the china shop” was no doubt intended to capture some of the fundamental nature of this kind of experience. In this case there are “too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” to borrow not so necessarily politically correct terminology. A few key individuals may be willing to do whatever seems necessary to protect their turf, expand their decision-making authority, improve their reputations and resumes, and advance their careers. In these cases the good of the group and organization is compromised by the pursuit of self-interest.

Many other group members may also add to the chaotic workplace experience by actively or passively aggressing leaders by not following instructions, rules and regulations. Getting quality-controlled work done on time and cost-effectively may take a back seat to interpersonal rivalries driven by personality and character attributes that are resistant to or outright opposed to authority. Group and organizational well-being is again compromised by these highly energized individual, interpersonal and group dynamics.

Stacey (1992) writes: “Chaos in a business organization takes the form of contradiction: the simultaneous presence of opposing ways of behaving. It is evidenced, for example, by managers who operate budgetary forms of control to keep the organization stable, while at the same time engaging in amplifying forms of political activity in which they try to undermine the status quo. Chaos in its scientific sense takes the form of conflict, as when an organization experiences the clash of countercultures, the tensions of political activity, the contention and dialogue through which managers handle ambiguous strategic decisions” (p. 68). He continues: “Chaotic dynamics are evidenced by escalating small changes and self-reinforcing circles, in the manner in which managers deal with events and actions that have long-term consequences” (p. 68).

It is certainly the case that much of what is potentially chaotic in the group or organization may be ritualized and institutionalized over time. A good example is the management versus union mentality where ritualized combat often seems more important than striving for organizational success. It is also the case that employees who are union or nonunion may contribute their fair share to the tensions. Other forms of ritualized group and organizational combat take the form of different disciplines that are usually organized into their own departments that may use language that is not understood by others. To this may be added unfamiliar thinking and analytical processes that tend to make other groups with different experience and expertise and approaches to problem solving and decision making anxious. One need only think of the implicit tension between automobile designers and automobile engineers, or financial analysts who compute the cost benefit in making a product recall versus marketing that wants to portray the company as socially responsible by caring about its customers and their well-being. Everyone may not be on the same page.

A great many more kinds and types of examples of potentially chaotic group and organizational experience could be provided. However, the reader, who is familiar with working in groups and large organizations, should have no difficulty thinking of many similar experiences that permit an in-depth understanding of what it means to experience chaotic organizational experience. It is, however, also important to appreciate that the most chaotic of workplaces contains other dimensions that may escape immediate awareness and understanding. The chaos may, in some ways, be understood to be one surface of the organization or group. Work experience may seem chaotic but yet there may also be a sense of a multilayered underlying structure that holds the group or organization together. Mathematicians who work with chaos theory and nonlinear feedback systems are quick to point out that, while at one level things may appear to be chaotic, there is a deeper or superordinate structure that organizes the chaos and permits understanding it. Organizations may then be understood to contain bounded instability (Stacey, 1992).

In Sum

Chaos presents organization members with an exceptional amount of anxiety-promoting ambiguity and uncertainty that is further aggravated by hard to understand, individual, interpersonal, group and organizational dynamics. It is the juxtaposition of the vagaries of operating businesses or large public organizations with these organizational dynamics that humbles the best efforts of executives, consultants and researchers to fully comprehend them, much less effectively and consistently manage them. Group and organization leaders, charismatic or not, are faced in many ways with an insurmountable problem. Nonetheless, when in doubt they must proceed. The utility of dynamic workplace theory arises out of this need to be able to function within this hard to know chaotic context of bounded instability.