Leftover thoughts

I finished my paper on Dominant Logic last week but my brain is still processing the information from all the research and reflection I've had to do. Anyway, I think I just need to jot them down in case I need them someday.

Dominant logic and the influence of personality and motivation

In an organisational context, the dominant logic helps managers to make critical decisions. Dominant logic is in essence a way of thinking that is formed by learned behaviours. These behaviours evolve from operant conditioning, paradigms, pattern-recognition process and cognitive biases (Prahalad & Bettis 1986).

My paper was on my own dominant logic and its limitations. By analysing two situations, I found that whenever I was given additional duties, I'd tend to get tunnel vision and just plough my way through it. I can forget about whatever is going on in my immediate surroundings like whether or not everyone else is coping well or needs assistance. In many ways, my focus has helped me to complete a lot of things but at what expense? My colleague broke down in tears and I am ashamed to say that I probably saw the signs (taking lots of sick leave, making lots of errors in reports, not completing management reports) but I chose to not do anything about it. Not once did I ask her how she was doing, nor did I ever offer to help her out with any of the tasks. Sad to say, I chose to ignore the signs and then the consequence was that I had to step in and takeover some of the tasks in addition to my own.

If Prahalad and Bettis are right in that my dominant logic comes from learned behaviour, then I would have learned this behaviour earlier in my childhood and adolescence, and then through reward and punishment, the behaviour is reinforced. BF Skinner calls this operant conditioning and through his experiments with lab rats, found that the frequency of a behaviour can be increased or decreased by positive and negative reinforcement as well as punishment and extinction. Going back to my behaviour, it is probably a norm for parents and teachers to teach children that the right thing to do is to do a task well, and I most likely took this lesson to heart, and it therefore formed part of my dominant logic to focus on the task at hand.

But is it sufficient to say that my thinking was formed through a behaviour that was reinforced and the paradigm I was in at that time? I couldn't help but feel a little shortchanged with this theory. I think that it is deeper than that. I think that apart from learned behaviour, my dominant logic was also partly formed by my personality as well as my motivation. According to Digman's (1990) dimensions of personality ie. extraversion vs introversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability vs neuroticism, and intellect, I think that I score pretty high on the conscientiousness factor. McLelland's need for achievement theory also resonates with my behaviour and how it was reinforced in the first place - it was because the way it was reinforced filled my motivation and personality needs.

References:

1. Bettis, RA & Prahalad, CK 1995, ‘The dominant logic: retrospective and extension’, Strategic Management Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 5-14, Expanded Academic ASAP, Gale, viewed 16 March 2010.
2. Digman, JM 1990, ‘Personality structure: emergence of the five-factor model’, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 41, pp. 417-440.
3. James, LR & Mazerolle, MD 2002, Personality in work organizations, Sage Publications, USA.
4. Prahalad, CK & Bettis, RA 1986, ‘The dominant logic: a new linkage between diversity and performance’, Strategic Management Journal, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 485-501, Expanded Academic ASAP, Gale, viewed 16 March 2010.
5. Prahalad, CK 2004, ‘The blinders of dominant logic’, Long Range Planning, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 171-178.