Level Minus 1: Negative Relationships

This level pertains only to the unusual situation where we basically do not treat one another as human at all, as might be the case between “master” and slaves, a prison guard and prisoners, or, sadly, some caretakers and emotionally sick or elderly patients at a hospital or nursing home. In the organizational world, we would rarely expect to find such exploitation or indifference, but we occasionally see it in sweatshops, in the factories of some other countries, and, unfortunately, in the attitudes of some managers who view their employees as merely hired hands. Where Level Minus 1 is accepted, employees typically characterize their work situation as “inhuman” but tolerate it because they feel they have no choice. For example, we referred earlier to the recent New Yorker article (Grabell, 2017) that describes in some detail how a major producer of chicken exploits undocumented immigrants by reporting them to the authorities for deportation if they complain about low wages, long hours, or unsafe or inhuman working conditions.

Personization is absent in this relationship, which makes organizational “leadership” impossible because the potential followers will neither understand nor be motivated to do what the appointed leader may want them to do. But, as we know, some prisoners will accept a Level 1 transactional relationship with their captors by becoming “trusties” or collaborators, while most will hunker down into apathy or form more personal Level 2 relationships among themselves. For example, in the Chinese and North Korean POW camps during officially sanctioned outings on rafts to get some fresh air on the river, the prisoners organized the following routine: one person would “accidentally” fall overboard, forcing the guards to rush over to rescue him, only to discover, just as they had safely pulled him on board, that another POW had fallen off the other side of the raft, with everyone putting on “innocent” faces (Schein, 1956). Inventing these new ways to harass the guards and to amuse themselves became an important distributed Level 2 leadership process among the POWs.

Domination and coercion by officials results first in creating closer Level 2 relationships among the dominated, and then to inventive ways to defeat the purpose of the officials, which in industrial/plant situations becomes one of the forces leading to unionization. Paradoxically and, in a sense, tragically, what begins as an effective counter-organization subculture may itself develop hierarchy and formal bureaucracy, which can result in far less effective leadership within the union and more explicit intergroup conflict between “management and labor.”