Peter Pre­vos, 16 July 2010.

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Har­vard Style Cita­tion
Peter Pre­vos 2010, ‘Pos­i­tions Vacant’, hypotheticorp.org, web­log post, accessed 5 Feb­ru­ary 2012, <http://hypotheticorp.org/wp/management/deviance/>.

APA Style Cita­tion
Peter Pre­vos, (2010, July 16). Pos­i­tions Vacant [blog post]. Retrieved from http://hypotheticorp.org/wp/management/deviance/

MLA Style Cita­tion
Peter Pre­vos. “Pos­i­tions Vacant” hypotheticorp.org n.p., 16 Jul. 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2012

Would you like to work on the front lines of con­tem­por­ary management?

Hypo­thet­icorp is hir­ing and we are look­ing for people that don’t fit  the cul­ture of their cur­rent work­place and have dif­fi­culty being aligned with cor­por­ate goals. At Hypo­thet­icorp we believe that the only thing you have to be aligned with is your  own self.

We acknow­ledge that devi­ant beha­viour and tak­ing cal­cu­lated risks is the found­a­tion of  innov­a­tion. We there­fore look for inde­pend­ent crit­ical thinkers who can add  value to Hypotheticorp.

If this was a real recruit­ment add it would have been a very odd one indeed. Most com­pan­ies are look­ing for so called align­ment and match­ing cul­tural val­ues. At Hypo­thet­icorp we believe that this will lead to a severe lack of innovation.

The major cor­por­ate col­lapses and scan­dals of the recent years have caused a tight­en­ing of cor­por­ate gov­ernance and many organ­isa­tions have moved away from open mod­els of lead­er­ship that value self ini­ti­at­ive to more regi­men­ted mod­els of management.

Even though the west­ern world is waging war to spread demo­cracy around the globe, the one aspect that dom­in­ates most people’s lives, their work­places, are ideally mer­ito­cra­cies, but are mostly more like dic­tat­or­ships.  Most organ­isa­tions are man­aged through clear hier­arch­ical lines and people are not very likely to go against the grain.

Research shows that employ­ees do not only remain silent because of a fear of retri­bu­tion, but also because it is per­ceived as a waste of their time. This silence cre­ates psy­cho­lo­gical ten­sion and cog­nit­ive dis­son­ance and even­tu­ally less com­mit­ment with organ­isa­tional goals.^1.

Organ­isa­tional devi­ance is, how­ever, a major source of innov­a­tion. Without the free­dom to make mis­takes there can be no learn­ing. The cur­rent wave of tightened cor­por­ate gov­ernance leads to the silen­cing of dis­sent­ing voices and prun­ing of innov­at­ive actions. The ulti­mate con­sequence of this is the impov­er­ish­ment of man­age­ment practices.

1. Detert, James R., Burris, E. R., & Har­rison, D. A. (n.d.). Debunk­ing four myths about employee silence. Har­vard Busi­ness Review, 88(6), 26. [↩]