The post is about how people behave under different contextual settings. The reactions are most extreme when the onus of any mishap doesn't lie within. The Milgram experiment conforms to this behavior. It showed how far the people are ready to go, beyond their personal threshold level, to justify the expected behavior. In general, people are more committed towards the outcome of the assignment than its objectives and its impact.. A similar experiment, the Prison Experiment, delves into the extremities of role-playing by the volunteers even when it was just a mock environment. The experiment poses a very serious question, "How to behave rationally and responsibly when you are in an authoritative position but are expected to act against your judgmental bases".
The idea to explore is how an organization culture is shaped to guide the behavior of people. Example of Disneyland is probably the one of the best examples that show how the organization's culture is deeply ingrained within the psyche of its employees that they remain in their character even when nobody is watching. This understanding also provides an insight into our child life bringing up. The way we structured our understanding of different situations and shaped our mannerisms to act and judge in atypical situations.
In a corporate setting, we often come across situations where taking decisions is tough especially when the decisions have an impact on others' life. The cultural setting where good behavior can emerge in the same way as the undesirable behavior can amplify and overcome the internal voices. In my personal experience the culture of the organization dictated that the client deliverable's have to submitted on time no matter what. Although it was the organization's duty to fulfill the contractual obligations, it's not true that the system will fail if one deliverable is not submitted on time.
Although the negative aspects of human behavior are more discusses, it is also important to analyze if there are any positives. One such positive behavior is the extent to which the people are willing to go for ensuring that the objectives are met. As a leader we'd often come across situations where the support from the team would be far more important than anything else. Most often the team cease to perform well because of the repercussions of failure would be very high. In such situations it is important that we try to take away the onus of responsibility from the sub-ordinates. Another positive I can think of is the way trust is built in the system. So as we saw the regular people had faith in the professor that the experiment is being conducted for the greater good of the organization or the society. This trust is important from the organization's point of view. This is probably the reason why we as child experimented because there was always a home leader backing our efforts and absorbing the accidental fatalities.
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