Organizations and individuals

Organizational and personal characteristics are self-reinforcing. The characteristics of people in an organization determine the policies and practices, which, in turn, determine the people who are attracted to and remain with the organization. There is limited research on the consequences of homogeneity for organizational effectiveness, and the predictions made by the ASA model are complex.

Many if not most firms are in the midst of responding to rapid structural, technical, environmental, and even cultural changes taking place in the social and economic spheres that surround them. Internal shake-ups, downsizings, globalization, reorganizations, mergers, and acquisitions (with their persistent absorption dilemmas) are common (Schneider, 62). Employees in many organizations move continually from one collaborative, perhaps cross-functional, work unit to another. Operations move across national boundaries, taking subcultures abroad, and transnational migration waves bring subcultural diversity back home. Projects and specific assignments, not departments, increasingly shape work identities. People come and go in organizations, making attachments to any given work unit uncertain at best.

In suggesting the formative role that social histories play in the emergence of trust and distrust, these models imply that individuals' judgments about another's trustworthiness or lack of trustworthiness are anchored, at least in part, on their a priori expectations about the other's behavior and the extent to which subsequent experience affirms or discredits those expectations (Boyle, 123). The analysis of trust development supports such arguments. Individuals' expectations about trustworthy behavior, they propose, tend to change, “in the direction of experience and to a degree proportional to the difference between this experience and the initial expectations applied to it” (Boyle, 124). In support of such arguments, numerous empirical studies have shown that interactions that reinforce individuals' expectations about others' trustworthiness increase trust, while interactions that violate those expectancies undermine trust.

In such settings, there are no doubt numerous and competing versions of what constitutes appropriate lines of action.

The conception of paranoid cognition developed in this chapter proceeds largely from a social information processing perspective on organizational behavior. According to this perspective, a complete understanding of paranoid cognition—or any form of social judgment in organizations —requires recognition of the organizational context within which such judgments are embedded. As (Schneider, 63) has argued, in order to understand organizational behavior, it is essential to examine the “informational and social environment within which behavior occurs and to which it adapts” (Schneider, 31). One reason context is so consequential, they argue, is that it selectively ...