Impression management
Many organizations set great store by relatively trivial details, that impress senior management but have little to do with effective work
performance: the right mannerisms, the right
clothes, or the right buzzwords. Padfield’s
history[10] of battleships describes how
promotion in the Royal Navy of the 1890s
went to officers with the most highly polished
ships, which caused a few to behave as if they
had forgotten what battleships were for; they
avoided gunnery practice in case the powder
smoke spoiled their paintwork. An extreme
case of this trend may be termed the World
War I mentality. Organizations occasionally
exist in which subordinates gain credit for
pushing ahead with management plans that
are absurdly wrong, in pursuit of aims which
are completely pointless, stifling criticism
either of purpose or of method with cries of
“commitment” and “loyalty