Opportunist
Look at this scenario;
When a person is given a task or asked for a help, “OK, I’ll do it but with conditions…”
The attitude, known as opportunism always happen in our daily life. According to Wikipedia, opportunism is the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of circumstances, with little regard for principles. The term can be applied to individuals, groups, organizations, styles, behaviours, and trends.
Opportunism occurs in many ways;
- When a person sees the profit of something for himself
- When a person need to react to gain something
- When a person refuse to take any risk of the job
- When the person refuse to responsible
Opportunist, often looks like self centred but, in some case we need to become opportunist. It is impossible a worker do the job for free, unless he’ll get the salary and given a time to rest.
Opportunist development has 5 main influences;
§ Controls: some organizations may have a code of behaviour or a set of rules which makes opportunist behaviour extremely difficult to operate, because there are clear and immediate penalties for opportunist behaviour. Other organizations may be so loosely structured and so lacking in controls and sanctions regulating behaviour, that opportunist behaviour is almost unavoidable. Thus, the nature of an organization itself may promote or inhibit opportunist behaviour; it depends greatly on the controls and checks it can exercize over its members, and on what sort of people it will attract.
§ Rationale: much depends on whether the organization really has a principled basis for its activities to start out with (a clearly defined, agreed understanding about the relationship between goals and the means to achieve them). Lacking such a principled foundation, the organization may find itself constantly trying to compensate for both opportunist errors and factional errors.
§ Norms: behaviour which in some organizations is regarded as "opportunist", may be regarded as perfectly acceptable in others, or tolerated as "normal". A "commercial attitude" might be to make as much money as one can, and this may be accepted as normal by the commercial people concerned, although others would regard it as "opportunist". Or, in a game, some "opportunist moves" may be permitted, while others are not.
§ Size: in general, the larger an organization is in terms of members, the more scope its members have to engage in opportunist behaviour, since the larger it is, the less individual members are practically able to check or control the behaviour of many other members, and the more possibility there is that groups of members will develop self-serving interests which deviate from the stated goals of the organization. However, this is not always the case, a lot depends on how people are organized and what morality they have.
§ Purpose: the scope for opportunism depends very much on the nature and goals of the organization itself, and on the strength and integrity of its leadership. If for example the organization sets itself the task to exploit risks and opportunities to advantage, then no matter what its size is, it will tend to facilitate opportunist behaviour. If, on the other hand, the aim of the organization is to carefully conserve a state of affairs or belief system, this is much less likely to attract opportunists. Even in a very conservative organization, opportunism may also occur, insofar as it still has to find ways to cope with risks, changes and opportunities.
