Personal Scenarios: An Empirical Study of Their Relation to Individual Performance and to Organizational Activism

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between an individual's scenario about his own future and his characterizing behaviors within the institutional setting. Statements made by 87 persons about their own futures (5 years ahead) are examined, coded (in terms of the person's ease of projecting himself into the future situation), and related with measures of the person's overall performance and activism within the organizational system. The relationships (and nonrelationships) found indicate that there are behaviorally important differences in individual styles of cognizing one's own future. Two different orientations toward futurity seem to be evidenced from these results and those previously reported by the author in Human Relations. The first is a facility to project oneself ahead and to picture one's own future, which is associated with active participation in the ongoing organizationalprocesses. The second is a motivation to generate multiple images of alternatives to the prevailing system, which is associated with organizational activism and innovative behavior.

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