THE PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE ORGANIZATION

            All of us desire to be part of a healthy organization or the resilient type wherein the organization can react right away to challenges and recover rapidly from those they cannot move away. But it’s so sad to say that most organizations are not resilient, they are more of passive-aggressive. Employees who are part of a passive-aggressive organization feel strongly that they don’t know which decisions they’re responsible for, that good information is hard to acquire, and that the quality of their work is not being accurately considered. But these things are in contrast to the resilient organization.

A passive – aggressive organization have possessed these characteristics:

Unclear scope of authority. It's not clear who makes decisions, leading to dropped balls and to second-guessing or interference from higher-ups. Based on my experience, in our organization, indeed, there was an unclear scope of authority. Campus Director was given authorities to make decisions which at any time can be interrupted by the President.

Inability to Execute. In our organization, sometimes an employee cannot move freely or decide on whatever decision they may take even if it is aligned to the job description of a certain employee because it needs always an approval from the direct superior to the top management prior a certain plan or project be realized. To make the story short the "final say" is always coming from the top management who manage the organization.

Misleading goals. Incentives that are not aligned with overall objectives ---- or not aligned with other goals across the organization --- can cause chaos and give employees an opportunity to make excuses instead of making things work.

Agreement without cooperation. People pay lip service to change but secretly 'hope it will go away' and don't put energy and effort into making it happen. Subsequently, with unclear scope of authority it led to agreement without cooperation.

Ineffective Decision Making- So many times that the school refused to send IT instructors to attend for a National Training for the reason that they can't afford to defray expenses or what we call "No Budget" If you push through then you have to "use your initiative" those are the words in which I usually heard.

            For me sending IT Instructors for training especially national training is very important because of its rapid changes in terms of technology. Thus, instructors in IT must be updated and should acquire new knowledge and learning from time to time to achieved quality education as the schools' mission.

            It is sad to note that our organization belongs to passive-aggressive organizations, everyone agrees but nothing changes. It's already part of the mindset of the employees and culture of the organization that everything will be pass by. For example, there is a memorandum for the energy conservation. Turning ON of the air-condition unit should be at 9:00 am and be shut down at 4:00 pm. At first, employees followed the memo but eventually ignored after a few days. Lack of monitoring of the implementation may lead the employees disregard the memorandum.

            Also, even there were trainings in methods of teaching to improve teaching-learning process, but some still prefer to teach in a traditional ways. As they say, 'Whether they will use the new methods or not, they still receive the same salary, why bother?'

            I belong to a passive-aggressive organization because I am working with the institution that has fewer chances in implementing new technologies. There are a lot of projects and proposals that are being passed to the office. Some are implemented because of compliance of the program and some are rejected. It doesn’t hinder my passion in continuing sharing our knowledge and skills to our student. I just find ways to improve in my own strategies. There are times also that I am very eager to attend seminars but due to lack of budget, we choose to stay in the office.