What is a macro-contingency?

Let's see what macro contingencies consist of and what their consequences are in organizations.

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 there are different contingencies and also what is known as macrocontingencies. what is known as macro-contingency. We are going to inquire about this issue to better understand the concept, to know how it is generated and what are the repercussions it has on the organization.

What is macrocontingency?

In order to be able to speak about the definition of the macrocontingency, it is necessary to clarify previously a series of concepts related to this one. To begin with, we must situate ourselves in the context to which we are referring, which is that of a company's cultural practices, or in other words, corporate culture..

Corporate 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 of this organization.

On this basis, it is easy to understand that the company's culture will be unique for each company. There may be some that are more or less similar, but the peculiarities of each organization will ultimately always have differentiating elements. The same will be true for the macro contingency, as we will see below.

Therefore, within each of these cultural practices (or company culture), we will find common forms of behavior within the organization. Each of these forms of behavior is known as a macrobehavior.. When all the individuals in the company act according to these patterns, resulting in specific outcomes, this is where the macro-contingency arises.

Macrocontingency is, therefore, the relationship that is generated between the elements that make up the corporate culture and the set of all the results to which these macro-behaviors give rise.. At this point it is important to bear in mind that this set, i.e., the sum of all the effects of the behaviors, is greater than the accumulation of them.

In other words, the total is greater than the sum of the parts, since this final result also takes into account the interactions that occur between the different components. All these factors are the ones that, consequently, give rise to the fact that each company has a specific macrocontingency, 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 macrocontingency and to know what are the characteristics of one and the other, 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 the corporate culture generate an interaction between them that adds up to the overall result. Each of these behaviors, in relation to the effects it has on the effect of the corporate culture and, in turn, on the probabilities that the behavior in question will be repeated over time, is called a meta-contingency.

There are therefore important differences between this phenomenon and that of macrocontingency. To begin with, macrocontingency would be referring to the overall picture of all those behavioral elements that we have seen that made up the company's culture, in addition to the interactions and interactions themselves.The macrocontingency, in addition to the interactions and added effects that arise from the combination of several of them, would refer to the global image of all those behavioral elements that we have seen that make up the company's culture.

In contrast, metacontingency would refer to one of these behaviors in particular, not to the whole. Moreover, it would be taking into account not only the possible interactions that could be taking place with other behaviors that are part of the corporate culture, but also how likely it would be that, depending on this interaction, it would be repeated in the future.

However, macrocontingency does not refer to this type of probabilistic predictions, but, as we have seen, it takes a general picture of all the elements of a company's culture, it takes a general picture of all the elements and their relationships, to explain the final outcome we find. These are questions that allow us to place on different planes these two elements that, although they are related, are independent.

Moreover, when we talk about the probability that a behavior of the corporate culture will be repeated, depending on the results it generates, within the context of meta-contingency, we can introduce a new element, which 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 are adapted to the company's environment and therefore promote satisfactory results will be more likely to "survive" and be repeated later on, as opposed to others whose consequences are not so positive for the organization's performance. and be repeated later on, as opposed to others whose consequences are not so positive for the organization's functioning. Let us remember that the concept of cultural selection is associated with meta-contingency and not macro-contingency.

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 degree of popularity, other alternative proposals have also emerged that attempt to explain the phenomena associated with macrocontingency from another perspective.

This is the case of the work of Diana Delgado, from the Konrad Lorenz University Foundation, in 2012. This author affirms that the models generally used to deal with business behavior and culture, such as Glenn's model, put too much weight on what she calls selectionism. For Delgado, this selectionism would be limiting the evolution of this theory and therefore a revision 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 whole theory of corporate culture in such a way that, even with less complexity, it allows valid predictions to continue to be made on this issue in reference to organizational behavior.

One of Delgado's criticisms of Glenn's model is precisely the use of the simile of natural selection to speak of cultural selection.. For her, this comparison does not entirely fit the reality it is intended to describe, and makes it difficult to define the concept of the unit of cultural selection and the unit of analysis, which are not entirely 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 deeper into the problem and take the form of several proposals. One of them is precisely to give a concrete definition to the unit of cultural selection we were talking about, which is necessary in order to eliminate ambiguities in this regard.

It also speaks of the importance of to make it clear whether, when considering the relationships between the behaviors that make up the company's culture, we are dealing with a problem that is not a matter for the company's culture.The author also speaks of the importance of making it clear whether, when considering the relationships between the behaviors that make up the company's culture, this is a problem that belongs to behavioral science or whether it should be studied from a different perspective. On the other hand, he sees the need to rethink all the concepts used in Glenn's study, including that of macro-contingency.

The objective would be to analyze all these elements in order to be able to draw conclusions about the need for all of them and to have a concrete definition of those that are essential for the new model proposed to study corporate culture from an updated perspective. The last of the points that Delgado tries to study is that of the relationships between all these elements. the relationships that are established between all these elements..

Focusing now only on the observations that the author makes on the concept of macrocontingency, she doubts that the global result of the behaviors and their relationships referred to in this term may in fact not be differentiated from the set of contingencies themselves.

For this reason, she prefers to simplify the model and not to 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 she affirms that there are no palpable differences between the two as to use them separately, since they unnecessarily hinder the structure of the model, which could be simpler.