The Development of a Bureaucratic Personality - Consequences for Organizational Learning

Effective learning supplys organizations with the abilities to cope with problems. Learning is occuring when organizations interact with their environments: organizations develop their understanding of reality by observing the results of their acts (cf. Hedberg 1981: 1). Even and especially bureaucratic organizations need to learn, when taking into account a fast changing environment.
Everybody of us has made his or her own experiences with bureaucracy in their everyday life. This seminar paper with the title “The Development of a bureaucratic personality-consequences for organizational learning” will not focus on impacts on clients but on impacts on the members of organisation, especially on subordinates and the middle management.
The aim of the seminar paper is to find out what negative consequences has bureaucracy on the personality of an individual and on organizational learning. Using a functionalist approach to the topic, bureaucracy intends to create an efficient organisation from a rationalistic point of view. I will focus on the unintended outcomes of bureaucracy, the dysfunctions which show that there are irrational factors that are not easy to predict. I will describe in the theoretical part of this work the he ideal type of bureaucracy, to have a basis from which later on the negative outcomes are explained. The concept of personality will be described after this, which is used to compare in the second part the changes to a bureaucratic personality. The model of organizational learning from Hedberg (1981) will be the focus after that, to show how learning is occurring in organisations and which prerequisites are necessary for this. The next step is the explanation of the model of Bosetzky and Heinrich, which shows the consequences of inner acceptance of the bureaucratic socialization. Then I will show through the description of the work of Robert K. Merton the development of a bureaucratic personality, including trained incapacity occupational psychosis, and the consequences of that for organizational learning. Then I will finish with an conclusion.