Organizations, like people, have personalities, but their traits or dimensions are not the same as they are for people. While an organization has reporting relationships, people do not. Traits of “authoritarianism” and “conformity” apply both to people and to organizations, while other characteristics, like “employee participation,” are unique to organizational hierarchies and do not apply to people.

Five Organizational Personality Traits
The personality trait most relevant to an organization is authoritarianism, or the degree to which that organization can take control and hold authority in the workplace. Herbert A. Simon, a social scientist who won the Nobel Prize for economics, has stated that authority is the mode of influence that distinguishes an individual’s organizational from nonorganizational behavior, with authority giving an organization its formal structure.

An organization chart is an authority structure showing how people in a position of authority have the formal power to distribute, withhold, or retract economic benefits from those lower in the hierarchy. The formal, psychological definition of authoritarianism includes three attitudinal clusters: aggression, submission, and conventionalism. For instance, organizations can be characterized as authoritarian if they use human resource (HR) practices—like personnel policies calling for discipline—that score high on these three behaviors, and as nonauthoritarian if they do not score high on all three.

Punitiveness relates to the extent to which employers punish employees, and it is a trait related to authority because authoritarians control people by punishing them. An employer inclined to control employees with HR practices that chastise them (by using discipline or by withholding or retracting economic benefits) is more likely to rate high on punitiveness and authority than an employer that controls employees through nonpunitive practices.

Employee conformity expresses the extent to which employers successfully move employees to their (the organization’s) norms or standards of behavior.

Employee participation represents the extent to which employees share in the decision-making process. Employee participation can range from relatively minimal, whereby employers inform employees of what is occurring in the organization, to relatively extensive (which is not common in the United States), whereby employees sit on the board of directors and have an influence on major organizational decisions.

Organizational socialization is the process by which employers acculturate employees to their norms, values, and behaviors, although this author sometimes uses the term to mean the extent to which employees are socialized or acculturated to the organization’s norms, values, and behaviors. Just as authoritarianism and punitiveness are related, employee participation and organizational socialization are related.

Research shows that when people are given input into the decisions that affect them, they become more committed to those decisions. This means that if employees are given input into the norms, values, and behaviors that affect them, they are more likely to commit themselves to them and thereby to become more highly socialized. The extent of socialization is important to employers because the more socialized employees are, the fewer bureaucratic mechanisms are needed to control them.

Three Ways Organizations Gain Compliance
The literature of organizational sociology advises that three types of organizations exist, as defined by how they gain the compliance of their members or employees. Coercive organizations, like prisons and custodial mental hospitals, are the most authoritarian and punitive and the least participative, with the least socialized members; they gain compliance by force.

At the other extreme, in terms of the personality traits named, are normative organizations, such as religious institutions and charities. Normative organizations gain the compliance of their members through common values; these organizations are the least authoritarian and punitive, with the highest level of employee participation and organizational socialization.

In between coercive and normative organizations are utilitarian, or remunerative, organizations—a group that includes most businesses. Utilitarian organizations gain the compliance of employees through the use of material rewards.

Employer Authoritarianism Outcomes
The five organizational personality traits described at the start of this article are important to employers because more than 60 organizational performance outcomes have been associated with them. Among the organizational outcomes associated with the degree of employer authoritarianism are the degrees of employee motivation and commitment; employee selection; employee complaints such as grievances, unionization, regulatory agency complaints, and litigation; implementation of incentive plans; implementation of performance appraisals; empowerment efforts; effectiveness of organizational change; productivity and effectiveness; programs for organizational learning; coaching; employee need achievement; employee creativity; job enrichment programs; levels of absenteeism; bullying; turnover; work stoppages; quality; and workplace violence.

Employer Punitiveness Outcomes
Among the organizational performance outcomes associated with employer punitiveness are the results achieved in empowerment; performance appraisals; levels of turnover and absenteeism; success or failure in the unlearning of old behaviors; and degrees of employee creativity, organizational learning, and productivity.

Employee Conformity Outcomes
Organizational performance outcomes associated with the level of employee conformity are organizational learning; role conflict; autonomy; job satisfaction; willingness to quit; organizational change; and employee involvement.

Employee Participation Results
Outcomes related to the degree of employee participation are seen in the degrees of productivity; organizational learning; organizational change; competitiveness; employee stress (which is related to health care costs); job satisfaction and commitment; employee creativity; employee performance; employees’ sense of security; implementation of gain-sharing programs; presence or absence of retaliation against whistle blowers; absenteeism; turnover; morale; motivation; safety; and decision-making quality.

Socialization Consequences
Among the performance outcomes reflecting organizational socialization are the levels of turnover; disciplinary actions; organizational stability; retaliation, or the lack of it, against whistle blowers; productivity; motivation; bureaucratic control; commitment and satisfaction; performance; and employee stress.

While the length of this article does not permit an extensive explanation of how these organizational personality traits lead to the outcomes, some links may be explained for illustrative purposes.

Authoritarian employers, which use aggression against employees for refusing to submit to behavior the employer considers conventional, may find that the employees have different concepts of conventionalism and are not happy with the employer’s aggression. Such unhappiness, depending on its extent, could lead employees to miss work, quit, produce at a level of output the employee considers only “fair” based on the standards of the workplace environment, seek protection in the form of union help or litigation, avoid risk-taking behavior, or, most drastically, use violence as a form of redress.

Conversely, participative employers generally see lower levels of employee stress because employees have more control over their work lives when they participate in the decisions that affect them; likewise, participative employers have employees who are more likely to show up and not quit and who assume an ownership interest in their jobs, with a greater concern for output.

Five Ways to Determine An Organization’s Personality
There are five ways of finding out, or measuring, where your organization stands in relation to other organizations on these personality traits, particularly with respect to authoritarianism. An organization may assess itself against:

1. Most obviously, the law. If an employer’s concept of conventionalism violates American legal standards, then that organization probably rates too high on the particular issue of concern.
2. Standard American conventions.
3. Industry or general business practices.
4. Employee feedback.
5. Benchmarks.

By optimizing its organizational personality, an organization can attain the more desirable human resources and other outcomes. With respect to the trait of authoritarianism, there is good reason to believe that employers can improve an organization’s behavior. Psychological literature on authoritarianism theory shows that individual authoritarians do not realize that they feed on authority.

Once apprised of this, however, they often are willing to change their behavior. When high authoritarian behavior is replaced by low authoritarian behavior, there should be less aggression shown when a failure to submit to conventionalism occurs.