Identity Flashcards
Ashforth & Mael (1989)
SIT & The Organization
- Introduce SIT into Management
- SIdentification: Perception of oneness with a group of persons
- Ant: Categorization of individuals; Distinctiveness of group; Salience of outgroup, prestige, group formation char.
- Out: support of inst (embod identity), affects group formation, intern of group values/norms, reinforce ant
- Key components: Categorization, In(out) group, status
- Factors: Cognitive (not affective or behave); personally experience success/failure of group, define oneself in terms of referent (group prototype).
- Workplace: SI vs Commit (Goal, not org specific); org socialization, role conflict, intergroup relations
- Compartmentalization: individuals may compartmentalize, cognitively separate identities and fail to abide by their values, norms, etc.
Individuals desire to identify with social categories to boost self-esteem
Swann (1987)
Identity Negotiation - social reality is not simply constructed by perceivers..targets negotiate to influence the way others see them.
- people seek environments that enable them to foster their self-views (i.e. selective interaction)
- people are motivated to defend & protect their most salient/central identities
- self-identities can be malleable (but for the change to be everlasting, people must fundamentally change how they view themselves, and others must provide feedback that supports the new self-view)
challenges self-enhancement theory (Baumeister) in that people with negative self-views seek negative feedback not positive
Discusses the dual system cognitive/affective crossfire
Self-verification can be interpersonal (i.e., influence tactics) or intrapsychic (i.e., seeing self-confirmatory evidence when it’s not there)
Brewer & Gardner (1996)
Levels of Identity
Personal identity, Relational Identity, Collective Identity
3 experiments
Priming of group identity (both small and large) made people more likely to perceive similarity between the self and others and to interpret ambiguous attitude statements as similar to one’s own point of view
Pratt (2000)
Managing Identification
- Amway, participant observation
- Process of aligning individual and org
- Identification: an individual’s beliefs about his or her organization become self-referential or self-defining” (different than commitment or fit)
- Sensebreaking: destruction or breaking of a person’s sense of self; creating a void where there once wasn’t
- Creates seekership (Search for meaning;identity deficits–ideal selves)
- SenseGiving-influencing the sensemaking process towards a preferred redefinition of org reality.
- Both are successful, identity with the org, if fail ambivalence and de-identify
Van Knippenberg et al. (2007)
Social Identity & Social Exchange
Where as the norm of reciprocity lies at the heart of social exchanges, self-definition lies at the core of the social identity perspective
Both motivate actions—> in SxC you respond in kind; in social identity you respond in the best interest of the identity
Support and identification were negatively related to withdrawal; and in both samples, identification buffered the impact of support on withdrawal.
Farmer & Van Dyne (2010)
Idealized & Situated Self
Prior approaches fell into 2 camps:
- -self-cognitions (i.e., centrality of self-identities)
- -working self-concept (i.e., identity salience, context dependent identity)
Contribution: context cues & psychological importance of identity interact to predict behavior
Role identity: reflects priorities and guides actions
extreme = role/person merger
more central = more likely behaviors adhere to role
fulfills need for self-verification & for self-categorization
2 forces affect identity salience (e.g., role occupancy & reflected appraisals)
Temporal/contextual influence whereby role occupancy moderated the positive relationship between psych. central identities and role behaviors (except helping identity and reflected appraisals had additive not interactive effects)
Ibarra (1999)
Provisional Selves
Banking and Consulting sample
- Professional Identity: Stable and enduring attributes beliefs values, motives and experiences which people define themselves in a professional role.
- Theory of adaptation: iterative process where sensemaking, action and evaluation tasks are regulated by interplay of internal and external influences
- Possible selves who one might become, would like to become or fears becoming.
- Adaptation tasks possible selves, guide attention in sensemakeing, select new behaviors for trial and direct their assessment
- During career transition as people identify role models, experiment with unfamiliar behavior and evaluate their progress (constructing possible IDs).
- Observing Role Models 2 part processes role prototyping (adding ingredients of possible selves-defined externally) and identity matching (can I pull that off)
- People assess & modify possible selves
Ashforth et al. 2008
o Identification only influences thought, feeling, and action when the associated identity is salient, that is, situationally relevant and subjectively important
o Situational constraints, competing identifications, impression management concerns, etc. can attenuate the link between cognitive and affective identification and behavior
o Identity conflict:
People cope by renegotiating demands, compartmentalizing or buffering, responding to most salient identity, prioritizing to resolve conflicts….or lying (Grover, 1993)
Weick (1995)
humans are meaning seekers and identifying with collectives and roles helps reduce uncertainty associated with new environments and changes in familiar environments.
Sluss & Ashforth (2007) Sluss et al. (2012)
Relational Identification
Relational Identification is an extension rather than a suppression of self
Dukerich et al. (1998)
Over identification
- the need for belonging is greater than the need to be distinct
- Moral identity may be subsumed by the organization, lose ability to question ethicality and legality of org actions
- May look away when faced with evidence of org wrongdoing and try to protect the org, perhaps even covering up (e.g. Watergate)
- High identifiers are vulnerable to having their identities dismantled
- May cover up on behalf of org..powerful person may be “too high to fall”
Recent identity research topics
Cross-domain identity transitions (Ladget et al. 2012) where one’s work identity must be adapted and integrated with a change in a non-work identity (e.g., newly expectant mothers) integrating identity and work-family conflict research
Leaders have a role in shaping followers’ identities through activating group-based identities BUT leader identity also predicts leader behavior (Johnson et al. (2012). Found leaders’ collective & individual identities predict transformational and abusive behavior
Team Identification
How do people change and sustain themselves in the face of identity threats?
Self-Affirmations as responses to identity threat (Cohen & Sherman, 2014)
