the rightness rings true

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keannu

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Does the underlined mean that even bad organizational values don't affect your judgement of rightness? Does this paragraph mean that you won't be swayed by the group's values ultimately?
(1)
An employee, like a child becoming an adolescent and then an adult, goes through similar stages.
(2)
Early on, what is right and wrong is defined very dogmatically in terms of rules and regulations.
(3)
As attachment to the group becomes more socially powerful, the employee worries about developing relationships, conforming and maintaining good social order by showing respect to authority.
(4)
But as the employee internalizes and understands the values of the organization innately, he develops a sense of rightness that doesn’t require rules, restrictions or social approval.
(5)
Instead, the rightness rings true because it sets up a resonance.
(6)
If you play a well-known piece of music, for example, and stop it before the last few notes, most people will mentally finish up the piece on their own.
(7)
When an organization instills an understanding of its values, most employees can answer questions of right and wrong intuitively without having to resort to rules or looking around for the responses of others.


 

SoothingDave

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No, not at all. It is saying that the employee will become so used to following the company rules and will so desire to be part of its social order that he will internalize the company's values so that they are his own. What is "right" will be "natural" to him, not because he is consciously following rules.

He will be assimilated. Trained. Brainwashed.
 

keannu

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Okay, I was mistaken. You are saying that the employee will follow the rules ,whether they are actually good or bad, brainwashed. He will act like an pre-programmed robot. Btw, what does this mean? I can't get it at all.

the rightness rings true because it sets up a resonance.
 

Raymott

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Resonance:
5.
a quality of enriched significance, profundity, or allusiveness: The poem has a resonance beyond its surface meaning.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/resonance

"Rings true" is an idiom for "seems to be true".

I believe this meaning of resonance comes from physics:
3. Physics The increase in amplitude of oscillation of an electric or mechanical system exposed to a periodic force whose frequency is equal or very close to the natural undamped frequency of the system.
The new employee begins to resonate with the system. (It's business/psych speak.)
 

JMurray

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As I understand it, it's suggesting that the rightness is intuitively felt because it resonates with the ingrained sense of values that has been instilled over time (as SDave describes). It connects with those values in a direct way that circumvents the need to check rules and regulations.

ps: I now see Raymott's post. I agree with him that this is business psychology jargon.
 

keannu

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I think you can paraphrase the underlined like this. If I'm wrong, let me know.
"the rightness you choose seems to be true as it gets accepted by others around you in the same organization, and goes in harmony with the whole system."

the rightness rings true because it sets up a resonance.
 

JMurray

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To me, it implies that the resonance with the instilled values occurs within the individual. But to be honest, language of this sort can be so vague as to be open to several interpretations. I'm not sure, if I were you, that I would bother spending a lot of time on it.
 
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