d. “Personal motivation” to the competence of “placement of role”

SYMPOSIA:
“Applying the dialogical model to organisational change”

SPEECH:
From “personal motivation” to the competence of “positioning of role”: the case study of prâgmata company
Pragmata’s mission is ‘to be a counselling laboratory for companies and organizations’: the term ‘Laboratory’ points out the fact that Pragmata studies oneself, tests and applies the organisational and managerial model to its structure even before applying it to the other companies where it operates.

The dialogical dimension could be a landmark for the organizational structure of the companies: infact, in the organizational processes and in its role as stakeholders ‘system’, it relates with the local area (the community) allowing, if we use a biological metaphor as analogy, an osmotic process among the company, the customers and the local area, enabling them to become an integral feature of how the organization produces. So the company is able to ‘take in’ both the processes that have been structured between the ‘organism’, the company, and its ‘habitat’ and the internal organizational processes that belong to the company.
In this latter case, the “company as a system”, is configurated more than the simple sum of its parts.
In a dialogical conception, the company is a self-managing system, osmotically linked to all its elements and to the habitat, that is the stakeholders and the local area-territory (the community).
In this way, this two hubs are tied by a complementarity relationship of necessity, and all of them contribute to achieve the same company’s aim, according to the definition of a scientific and organizational model and to a perspective of an ‘organism (or the company) fitted in its habitat (or its local area) ’.
To explain why it is important to examine elements, like the ‘roles’ and the related organisational processes, it is indispensable to consider some introductory issues. In fact, the roles are those ‘elements’ that allow the organism to “live”. By working on the roles, the organization can pursue its goals not only in terms of effectiveness but expecially of managerial efficiency. Moreover, working on the roles also permits to the organization to operate on the processes that generate and fulfil an organizational culture that, as a consequence, produces innovation.

Now, let us speak about the term MOTIVATION, starting with the definition taken from the Italian Dictionary Devoto-Oli, where we can read the following definition, here transladed: “The attitude that an individual takes towards an activity it has to carry out; in the learning area it is the fundamental attitude to achieve ‘success’. It is the individuals’ capability to learn how to achieve their personal goals.”

The term “motivation” maintains in the psychologist speech and in the common sense, a substantial open-endedness. Infact, it is used with reference to drive, heterogenous processes and behaviours: for exemple the “tendence” of organism to satisfy needs, or the scientist’s curiosity, or the desire to attain worknig successes or the fear to fail. This and other aspects are explained by different theories: to use one or another theory involves to favoure some aspects and leave aside some others. Referring to the company, the concept of Worker Motivation is used to define how much workers are engaged and how much they care of their job and, finally, how much they are available within working activities.
The motivation in the common sense is intended as a need and as a pulsion meant as a drive. In literature, two meanings are differentiated in the use of the term “motivation”: the former as a trait, the latter as a state. Motivation as a trait regards motivational attitude, viewed as a network of cognitive and emotional elements that characterize motivational processes. Motivation as a state regards the attitude of a person towards a specific situation, attitude that is particularly influenced by the features of interest and incentive intrinsic in the situation. Three essential elements can be recognized in motivation: 1. the aims; 2. the emotional relationships; 3. the person’s expectations regarding its capability to achieve the aim and the environment resources.
In the studies on motivation, it has recently been done a shift of perspective, that get the better of the idea that individual motivation might be related to an unitary “drive”. Today, motivation is regarded as a complex mix of elements that in their interactions contribute to generate the relationship between the individual and the role it has. Differently, according to the dialogical model applied to organization, the term “motivation” means all the processes that allow individuals to collocate themselves in a role. It follows that according to the motivation “expressed” or that individuals assign to themselves, the position occupied in the organizational matrix can change and so create discrepancy between the definition of role in institutional terms and the definition of role in interactive terms.
From a theoretical standpoint, two forms of motivation can be distinguished:
 Extrinsic Motivation: denotes all allows the individual to collocate itself in terms of role and that is not directly linked to the practised activity. Examples of extrinsic motivation are: benefits, career, responsibility, trust, respect, delegation, communication, and so on. In brief we can say that it is “extrinsically” motivating all that is not directly linked to collocation in terms of role.
 Intrinsic Motivation: denotes what enables the individual to collocate itself in terms of role and that is directly linked to the practiced activity. A typical example of intrinsic motivation is the sharing of the aim because it enables the individuals to collocate themselves in terms of role and to see the relationship between their own roles and the company’s aim. It is important that everyone understands what is its own involvement, that is its own contribution to the achievement of the company’s aim.
By considering Prâgmata as a “place of research and experimentation”, the reference that the company’s managerial roles employ to achieve efficient and “high-quality” processes, turns to both kinds of motivation.
On the contrary, the companies, in the management of employees, mostly utilize extrinsic motivation, so assuring the achievement of the result, but, since they don’t employ intrinsic motivation, they will always achieve lower level of efficiency and quality of their service/product because they don’t collocate the roles in regard with the aims. Because of some matters related to our culture, we tend to include among intrinsic motivations, some elements that have an extrinsic value, while we usually give little importance to the elements that actually urge to persist in a certain direction.
Career, money etc. are important things for the individual, but they are not so intrinsically motivating to carry out a specific activity. Intrinsic motivation is rather directly connected to the symbolic value of what one is doing.
In terms of intrinsic motivation, the adherence to the aim it is necessary to achieve, is essential to maintain an high level of motivation among the collaborators. The expertise of who is in a managerial position (belonging to the team too) is to illustrate and share with the team the pursued aims.

In these terms, the definition of the construct of MOTIVATION, re-defining it as a PROCESS OF POSITIONING OF ROLES, turns out to be a key element that permits on the one hand to go over the “person/role” dichotomy, and on the other end to prevail to the discursive dimension arising from from a personalized position of “justification” and “blame”, replaced by a discursive dimension related to a process of “assumption of responsibility”, practised from a team position.

In this regard, an aspesct that Prâgmata tested and analyzed on a theoretical way, is the organizational dimension of management, that cannot abstract from the team dimension. The “team culture” promoted by Prâgmata, implies that, when a teamwork does not achieve the aim, the interactive modality which takes place is related to the assessment of responsibility: so, the responsibility is of the whole teamwork for performing a new analysis of the processes in which has been produced the mistakes that obstructed the achievement of the aims. Within the team everyone has its own position and, from this assigned position, it acts to achieve the common goal.
In fact, the existenceof a team concernes all its members, eachone responsibles for its personal positioning and for the achievement of the common goal.

The recognition of the role as the essential element in the organisational processes means, inside the organizations, to qualify the professional role as the process that allows to take up a specific position in relation to an interlocutor, and so in relation to other roles.
Two key conditions are essential for the role assignment process: 1) the role should be institutionally assigned (institutionary dimension); 2) the individual must interact with the other roles of the context in respect of the objectives of the role (interactive dimension).
The act of “taking up a role” means that the individual places itself, under both the institutionary and the interactive dimensions. When a role is institutionally assigned, there will be an immediate actuation of the role within the organization matrix. In this way, at first the role will develop a process of symbolic ‘legitimation’, then a legitimation of status, where the relationships will be based on recognition. Instead, the interactive legitimation will be directly proportional to the frequency of its use: the more the role will carry out its managerial skills, the earlier the legitimation will get to the status level, thus maximizing both the efficacy and the efficiency of the role.
So, the role legitimation process is strictly linked to the process of ‘positioning’ and ‘personalization’ of the roles. The “identity of role” and the “personal identity” are two different ways that people can ‘use’ to join in a organizational matrix and so to act their role: the knowledge and the ‘management’ of this elements allow the company to maximize all the organizational processes.
Therefore, it is fundamental for the companies to point out strategies for the roles to take place in a managerial role dimension, that is in terms of competence. In Prâgmata, for example, within its organizational matrix, an organizational joint (or a role) has been defined for that we call ‘Positioning of Role’ of the Human Resources. This role has the task to identifiy useful strategies for all the company’s roles to discuss errors, their own managerial practices and the ways to achieve goals. In fact, the ‘dialogical’ perspective defined by the discursive dimension of the roles, allows to relate to the cognitive categories practised by the roles, and so it allows to realize all the discrepancies due to the use of personal criteria and personal theories and, instead, to re-turn the roles on a company dimension on its managerial and role aims.
So, now the question we can have could be: “How could we enable a role to use its competences?”

Moving by the assignment of a role, it is necessary, to achieve what the answer asks,, to identify a way for a role construction that primarily generates a process of anticipation of scenarios. “To anticipate” means to be able to understand the logical-conceptual relationship existing among the interlocutors, discarding the empirical-casual logic that pretends to govern the events. Infact, if we consider the events occurring inside a company, the possibility of previewing becomes an illusion, the same the possibility to assure the outcomes of an action. Instead, in a procedural standpoint, it is better to anticipate all possible scenarios that might result from some behaviours or interactions. It is just this anticipation of scenarios that will allow the role to find out strategies to manage the critical situations in respect of the company aims.
If the company uses strategies to monitor how the roles behave in terms of anticipation of scenarios, it also motivates its human resources, this if we consider that the roes placed in an organizational dimension, following a causal logic mechanism, tend to refer to personal issues in a deterministic logic.
Taking always Pragmata as example, it has created instituctional activities (monthly base-group meetings or individual counselling meeting to supervise an individual’s role), that allow its human resources, through a dialogical and discoursive dimension, to get more and more control and profitably of their role. In this way, a person that joins in the organizational context in a suitable way in regard to the role goals and not making reference to its personal ideas, will be able to manage the organizational inefficiencies finding out the critical issues and the related managerial strategies, so discarding its typical value judgements related to events.
In fact this “evaluation process” belongs to the personal dimension and increases the distance between the company’s goals and the individual’s modality. A typical charateristic of the companies is a proof of this: the criticalities existing in the communication flows could turn into personal quarrels between roles, because the personal ideas, aiming to defend oneself and to blame the others of having done a ‘mistakes’, hinders the identification of the criticality and impede to think its strategical solution.
And in fact the most common answers to the question “What are the communicative criticalities that characterize your organization?” are: “I have no problem with my direct colleagues, but regarding the other colleagues there are different ways of thinking”, or, “Communication is not very effective, sometimes the message arives distorted”. These kind of sentences don’t provide practical or strategic suggestions to those who manage and don’t provide suggestions about critical points one could intervene in; on the contrary these are personal evaluations regarding how the person thinks things work on, infact they are “observations” that allow everyone to keep its own way “to see” what is happening. In other words, these kind of sentences are rhetorical expedients that people uses to maintain coherent its personal theories about organization, without discussing or doubting about it, and so preventing the creation of an organizational and a managerial culture.

As we outlined before, Prâgmata, to handle these criticalities, has organized dedicated “meeting places”, for example during the recurring update meetings, or in certain occurrences where it is possible to work on the so-called “epistemology of the error”, under the leadership of an expert. These occasions allow the human resources to be collocated with reference to the “identity of role”, so examining the anticipation or management mistakes, to identify, in synergy among all the roles, all the aspects that need to be tended to, to overpass all critical points.
This kind of management, that is used in Prâgmata, is feasible since the organization considers and remembers that the positioning of roles is a process that must be handled. In the cases of organizations that have been organized in a bureaucratic way, the “know-how-to-be” dimension is not an immediate goal in the person training. Usually, these individuals play a role in an absolutely “automatic” way, without questioning themselves how the organizational matrix will be modified in connection with their actions. In these cases, as people do not anticipate the possible interactive scenarios (know-how-to-be), they obviate their failings relying on their technical knowledge (know-how-to-do) and on their personal relational manners, that is the ones the person effects also in not-professional contexts. It might happen, for example, that the communicative/interactive dynamics employed in private life recurs in the professional domain, risking to overlay personal aims with work aims. If the relationships among roles that are involved in a certain matrix are personalized, the matrix will suume an order founded on virtual aims. These aims are subjectively established by each member of the matrix, and they diverge from the real ones. The gap that is created in this way between “personal” and real aims, will produce a fragmentation of the matrix, that will reach lesser efficiency and effectiveness levels than the ones that would be reached through the pursuit of organizational aims, and even worse than the ones that would be possible with a teamwork.

Th work that enable to activate operational procedures and managerial modalities by the resources themselves, is articulated within a matrix of roles, whose founding element, that issues from the introduction of a team culture, is posing questions. Only asking, in fact, it is possible to apply a team culture with the perspective of generating a reality, intended as a discoursive reality, that could become a responsibility to everybody, and that prevent to hang on something, with an attitude like “let the others act in my place”.
In a dialogical dimension, some discoursive practices that resort to an exclusively extrinsic motivational process, and that prevent to operate towards a team culture, are the following ones:
- “The Common sense repertory”: it concerns discoursive practices that can be undifferentiatedly employed by anyone, and that issue from arguments that are not founded on organizational premises. Thus, they are not specific of a special professional domain, but rather they belong to the “common thinking”, even when they are practised by the roles. These are discoursive practices that move the role from the aim, to previously experienced realities.For exemple, “Everybody knows that we must do our duty”
- “The Dispute repertory”: it concerns discoursive practices that put polemical and ideological issues as basic elements of a reasoning; the person that uses this repertory does not propose the possibility to manage in any way the issue that is being debated. For exemple, “At the end it’s not right that only some of us work so much and others can manage work time how they want”.
- “The Cause repertory”: it concerns discursive practices that depict reality in terms of causal mechanism among the events; at the conventional level there is the use of terms as “because”, “by reason of”, “it is the fault of”, and/or sentences linked so that each one is the cause of the other one. For example, “Our company has these problems because the sale- office doesn’t know what happens in production sector”
- “The Precept repertory”: it concerns discursive practices that decree a reality providing directives, and so the roles are only on an exclusively operative level. For example: “This must be done…”, “In the meanwhile let’s do it, then will see”. These practices do not imply a management of the process. For example, “It is necessary to do…meantime we must do, then we can see...”
“The Complaint repertory”: they are discursive ways that prevent the realization of the efforts that are being done to improve the situation; they maintain the status-quo. For example, “In this sector none of us never has a moment of peace”
“The Reality Confirmation repertory”: they are discursive ways that designates reality as a certain unchangeable fact; they do not take in consideration the possibility of scenarios that could change reality. Reality is based on personal interpretation, not on scientific ideas. On a formal level there is the use of adverbs and/or conjunctions that decree an unchangeable state of things (“always”, “never”, “none” “everybody”, “everything”). For example, “Here nobody is skilled to make an evaluation done well!”.
Other discursive practices used by workers could be:
- “The Excuse repertory”.
- “The Guilt repertory”.
- “The Personal Opinion repertory”.

The described styles and discursive practices, that could be collected through open questions, are the element that maintain the individual and couple culture, blocking the transition toward a team culture.
An Organization that manages these issues, enables the role to “find” its reason to be inside the organization. A reason that, going beyond the personal dimension, in a discursive dimension subsume it, thus satisfying the person’s expressed needs and requirement and unexpressed needs, in a role perspective.

Going back to the organizational dimension, the companies often show a culture of organization based on a cluster of knowledge instead of an organizational culture, that is a culture oriented to the management of its organizative processes. In the transition between the two kind of cultures, the company is considered as a wealth to invest in, through cultural procedures that enable an investment on a managerial level. By creating a shared wealth, any connection with a background of casual experiences is given up and the choice of a corpus of competence (of role), defined and specified in respect of a common goal, is embraced.

The first implication of the building of a team culture, and of a role-oriented motivation, is a responsibility engagement by all the involved roles that interact in respect of a shared and common aim. The use of practices based on a responsibility engagement, implies to take in consideration the management of the positioning of role for the human resources.

The organizational culture, that is “everything that is generated by the company and that partecipates in the achievement of the aims, spreading so much to become the company’s wealth”, is not a peculiarity of the individual, it is not based on the peculiarities of the people that manage the company, but it is the fundamental element for innovating and for managerial efficiency. In fact, if innovation means an increase of the organisational value, based on a managerial efficiency in the management of the roles, then the organization’s ‘value’ is the higher the more the organization is able to anticipate and generate the needs of its resources and of the local area (the community). The company’s actions aimed to increase the efficiency, will participate to the enforcement process of the role competence, to the positioning of roles according to the aims, to the customer motivation and satisfaction, as a process based on the ‘role’ and on the aims.

An organization based on these assumptions, such as Prâgmata, cannot resort to strategies that supply a strategical worth to the organization. In fact, the organization, to achieve its own aims, keeping a constant monitoring of its managerial efficiency, will has to make “visible” its processes and organizational procedures, thus allowing the company to work on them. In this way it is possible to make ‘knowable’ also the ‘unknowable’ dimension of the ‘human’ effects on what, using a ‘company language’, we define as ‘productivity’.

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