Robert L. Kahn Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

We define successful aging as including three main components: low probability of disease and disease-related disability, high cognitive and physical functional capacity, and active engagement with life.

Robert L. Kahn
Innovative roles represent patterned organizational deviance... The intra-role conflicts of the innovator stem from his engagement and commitment to the creative, non-routine aspects of his job and his corresponding disinterest and disdain for the routine or uncreative demands placed upon him.

Robert L. Kahn
The concept of leadership has an ambiguous status in organizational practice, as it does in organizational theory. In practice, management appears to be of two minds about the exercise of leadership. Many jobs are so specified in content and method that within very broad limits differences among individuals become irrelevant, and acts of leadership are regarded as gratuitous at best, and at worst insubordinate

Robert L. Kahn
Social relations with one's work associates tend to deteriorate under the stress of conflict. In part, this reaction reflects the person's general dissatisfaction with the work situation. Attitudes toward those role senders who create the conflict become worse, just as do those toward the job and the organization in general.

Robert L. Kahn
Certain information is required for adequate role performance, that is, in order for a person to conform to the role expectations held by members of his role set.

Robert L. Kahn
The prescriptions and proscriptions held by members of a role set are designated as role expectations.

Robert L. Kahn
The role expectations held for a certain person by some member of his or her role set will reflect that member's conception of the person's office and his or her abilities. The content of these expectations may include preferences with respect to specific acts and personal characteristics or styles; they may deal with what the person should do, what kind of person he should be, what he should think, or believe, and how he should relate to others.

Robert L. Kahn
When you're 90 years old, you are somewhere near the end of your life; got to be... It doesn't feel like the end yet, but statistically, demographically, there can't be much left. But that's not part of my daily baggage.

Robert L. Kahn
Associated with each office is a set of activities, which are defined as potential behaviors. These activities constitute the role to be performed, at least approximately, by any person who occupies that office.

Robert L. Kahn
[A role conflict is]... the simultaneous occurrence of two (or more) sets of pressures such that compliance with one would make more difficult compliance with the other.

Robert L. Kahn