ABSTRACT
Organizations, like societies, face a problem of maintaining standards of behavior without destroying motivation or causing alienation. They must balance the inducement * offered by the promise of success through upward mobility against the fear of failure invoked by the threat of downward mobility. Discussions of mobility in society have treated success and failure as separate issues, emphasizing on the one hand the functions of stratification systems in motivating people to fill important roles [10, 24, 28], and, on the other, the role of downward mobility, uncertainty of success, and failure to reach culturally defined goals in producing deviant behavior. †
