A company is a changing entity that grows, modifies and adapts to the conditions of the environment and those of its own components.
Within these conditions different contingencies appear and also what is known as macrocontingency We are going to investigate this issue to better understand the concept, know how it is generated and what the repercussions it has on the organization.
In order to talk about the definition of macrocontingency, it is necessary to previously clarify a series of concepts related to it. To begin, we must place ourselves in the context to which we are referring, which is that of the cultural practices of a company, or what is the same, business culture
Business culture refers to the accumulation of behaviors, ways of thinking, beliefs, values, norms, etc., that all the components of the company in question have in common and that form a general line and, therefore, the culture. characteristic of this organization.
Starting from this basis, it is easy to understand that the company culture will be unique for each company. There may be some that are more or less similar, but the peculiarities of each organization will mean that, ultimately, they will always have differentiating elements. The same will happen with the macrocontingency, as we will see later.
Therefore, within each of these cultural practices (or company culture), we will find common forms of behavior within the organization. Each of these ways of behaving is what is known as macrobehavior When all individuals in the company act according to these patterns, they give rise to specific results, that is where the macrocontingency arises.
The macrocontingency is, therefore, the relationship that is generated between the elements that make up the business culture and the set of all the results to which these macrobehaviors give rise At this point it is important to keep in mind that this set, that is, the sum of all the effects of the behaviors, is greater than their accumulation.
In other words, the total is greater than the sum of the parts, since the final result also takes into account the interactions that occur between the different components. All of these factors are what, consequently, give rise to each company having a specific macro-contingency, unique and different from that of all other corporations.
Difference between macrocontingency and metacontingency
There is a concept associated with all these procedures, which is that of metacontingency It is also important to know it in order to distinguish it from the macrocontingency and to know what the characteristics of one and the other are, which will allow us to better understand this issue.
Metacontingency comes into play at an earlier level. We saw that all the behaviors involved in business culture generate an interaction between them that adds to the overall result. Each of these behaviors, in relation to the effects it has on the effect of business culture and, in turn, on the probabilities that the behavior in question will be repeated over time, is what is called metacontingency.
Therefore, important differences are observed between this phenomenon and that of macrocontingency. For a start, The macrocontingency would be referring to the global image of all those behavioral elements that we have seen that made up the company’s culture in addition to the interactions and added effects that arise from the combination of several of them.
In contrast, metacontingency would refer to one of these behaviors specifically, not to their group. Furthermore, it would be taking into account not only the possible interactions that it could be carrying out with other behaviors that are part of the business culture, but also how likely it would be that, based on said interaction, it would be repeated in the future.
However, macrocontingency does not refer to this type of probabilistic predictions, but rather, as we have seen, takes a general photo of all the elements and their relationships, to explain the final result we find These are questions that allow us to place on different levels these two elements that, although related, are independent.
Furthermore, when we talk about the probability that a behavior of the business culture is repeated, depending on the results it generates, within the context of metacontingency, we can introduce a new element that would be that of cultural selection. As occurs with the processes of natural selection with living organisms, this phenomenon would have a similar operation.
In that sense, those behaviors that adapt to the company environment and therefore promote satisfactory results will be more likely to “survive” and be repeated later in the face of others whose consequences are not so positive for the functioning of the organization. Let us remember that the concept of cultural selection is associated with metacontingency and not macrocontingency.
Criticisms of the macrocontingency model
The concepts we have seen so far come from a proposal made by author Sigrid S. Glenn, especially in her 2004 study. However, although this model has enjoyed a certain popularity, other alternative proposals have also emerged that try to explain the phenomena associated with macrocontingency from another way.
This is the case of the work of Diana Delgado, from the Konrad Lorenz University Foundation, in 2012. This author states that the models generally used to deal with business behavior and culture, such as Glenn’s, They put too much weight on what is called selectionism For Delgado, this selectionism would be limiting the evolution of this theory and therefore a review of different components would be necessary.
One of the concepts that this author reviews in her study is precisely that of macrocontingency. Delgado’s objective is to simplify this entire theory about business culture so that, even with less complexity, it allows us to continue making valid predictions on this issue in reference to organizational behaviors.
One of the criticisms that Delgado makes regarding Glenn’s model is precisely the use of the simile of natural selection to talk about cultural selection For her, this comparison does not fully fit the reality it aims to describe, and makes it difficult to possible define the concept of unit of cultural selection and unit of analysis, which are not completely clear in the original model.
In order to put an end to these inconsistencies, and thus clarify both the macrocontingency and the rest of the elements, Delgado proposes a series of questions that delve into the problem and are reflected in several proposals. One of them is precisely to give a concrete definition to that unit of cultural selection that we were talking about, which is necessary to be able to eliminate ambiguities in this regard.
He also talks about the importance of make it clear whether by proposing the relationships between the behaviors that form the company’s culture , this is a problem that belongs to behavioral science or, on the contrary, should be studied from another perspective. On the other hand, he sees the need to rethink all the concepts used in Glenn’s study, including that of macrocontingency.
The objective would be to analyze all these elements in order to draw conclusions about the need for all of them and have a specific definition of those that are essential for the new model proposed to study business culture from an updated perspective. The last point that Delgado tries to study is that of the relationships established between all these elements
Focusing now only on the observations that the author makes about the concept of macrocontingency, the author questions that this global result of the behaviors and their relationships to which said term refers could in reality not be differentiated from the set of contingencies themselves.
For this reason, he prefers to simplify the model and not use, on the one hand, the concept of the group of contingencies and, on the other, that of macrocontingency, since through the data provided in the study he affirms that there are no palpable differences between the two as to use them separately, since they unnecessarily complicate the structure of the model, which could be simpler.
