ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

330 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPFear of Temporary Incompetence. During the transition process onewill be unable to feel competent because one has given up the oldway and has not yet mastered the new way. The best examplesprobably come from the efforts to learn to use computers.Fear of Punishment for Incompetence. If it takes one a long time tolearn the new way of thinking and doing things, one will fear thatone will be punished for lack of productivity. In the computer arenathere are some striking cases in which employees never learned thenew system sufficiently to take advantage of its potential, becausethey felt they had to remain productive and thus spent insufficienttime on the new learning.Fear of Loss of Personal Identity. If one’s current way of thinkingidentifies one to oneself and to others, one may not wish to be thekind of person that the new way of working would require one tobe. For example, in the early days of the breakup of the Bell Systemmany old-time employees left because they could not accept theidentity of being a member of a hard-driving, cost-conscious organizationthat would take phones away from consumers who couldnot afford them.Fear of Loss of Group Membership. The shared assumptions thatmake up a culture also identify who is in and who is out of the group.If by developing new ways of thinking one will become a deviant inone’s group, one may be rejected or even ostracized. To avoid loss ofgroup membership one will often resist learning the new ways ofthinking and behaving. This fourth force is perhaps the most difficultto overcome because it requires the whole group to change itsways of thinking and its norms of inclusion and exclusion.Defensive Responses to Learning Anxiety. As long as learninganxiety remains high, one will be motivated to resist the validity ofthe disconfirming data or will invent various excuses why one can-