{"id":926,"date":"2008-12-06T10:24:37","date_gmt":"2008-12-06T18:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/?p=926"},"modified":"2008-12-06T10:49:48","modified_gmt":"2008-12-06T18:49:48","slug":"situational-vs-dispositional-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/06\/situational-vs-dispositional-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Situational vs. Dispositional Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my post about Philip Zimbardo’s work<\/a>, I mentioned the concepts of situational vs. dispositional tendencies. One might see these as being obscure cognitive constructs. However, a recent situation made me realize that beliefs about these tendencies have direct consequences on management styles. So let’s dig into this some more by starting with a description of the two tendencies before getting into consequences for management.<\/p>\n

Dispositionists believe that our tendencies and behaviors are fixed because of the kind of person that we fundamentally are. They search for explanations in a person’s character to explain their behavior. So when a criminal steals, they try to find the “flaw” in that person’s character that would make them perform such an act. This explanatory search can concentrate on nature (looking for genetic correlations) or nurture (looking at the childhood surroundings), but the search is for a character trait within the person that explains their actions. <\/p>\n

Situationists like Zimbardo think that people’s behaviors, while influenced by their parents and upbringing, are dominated by the situation in which they act. The Stanford Prison Experiment<\/a> is the most glaring example of this, where intelligent, well-adjusted college students turned into abusive guards and mentally unbalanced prisoners within three days of being placed in a prison environment. Because of these overwhelmingly powerful situational effects, if somebody performs “evil” actions, it is not necessarily an indication of a fundamental character flaw on their part; instead the situation must be examined to see how it contributed to the actions.<\/p>\n

When comparing the two, the dispositional viewpoint is easier to understand, with a simple narrative to explain somebody’s actions (“Lucifer is a bad person, which is why he did bad things”). The tricky thing here is that saying something is<\/em> something raises warnings flags for me (see my review of Wilson’s Quantum Psychology<\/a> for a longer take on the difficulties of “is”-ness). Attributing a characteristic as a fundamental component of something, as is<\/em> implies, simplifies the narrative, but at the cost of making us more vulnerable to the true complexities of life (I’m reading Taleb’s The Black Swan<\/em><\/a> right now which expands upon this idea). The dispositional viewpoint also has dangerous consequences in how we raise kids<\/a>: treating intelligence and talent as fundamental characteristics of children actually retards their development, as they don’t even try to improve themselves. I think that while we have dispositional tendencies, we need to recognize the situation defines how we behave<\/a>. But I’m going to stop with the discussion of the tendencies themselves (since others have done it better), and focus on the managerial consequences of these two ways of thinking about people. <\/p>\n

In a dispositional workplace, life is relatively simple – you interview candidates, find the ones that have the right fundamental attributes (e.g. “Smart and Gets Things Done”<\/a>), and then focus on removing obstacles to progress<\/a> so that these people get things done, in accordance with their nature. It’s a nice, tidy view of the world. Unfortunately, I think it’s too simple, as it ignores the influence of the system on the attributes that people display – people that are tremendously successful and effective under one system might be completely ineffectual and unmotivated in another system where their strengths go unused, as sports teams find out each year in free agency. <\/p>\n

Situational management is about designing the system to match people with the appropriate environment to get the desired organizational results. This system design can take a couple forms:<\/p>\n