ABSTRACT
Organizations may engage in many obscure forms of demotion to avoid openly confronting a person's failure. This chapter discusses responses to the "cooling out" strategies an organization may use to effect a subtle demotion. There are numerous organizational methods for cooling out, but any given organization cannot make casual selection among them. These methods flow both from the organizational structure and from accepted ways of behavior. The organizational strategies for handling partial or complete failures of personnel are many and add up to a complex system of policy acts. Such a system for handling failure is integral to getting men allocated, jobs done, and administrative leaders, high and low, picked, trained and developed. A system of mutually supporting methods wherein those methods do not run excessively afoul of one another cannot exist when the organization is undergoing great policy changes or has just terminated a major power struggle.
