7.3 Identity and the Organization Member

While organizational identity may be developed by an organization, organizational identification may be developed by its members. In introducing their concept of organizational identification, Ashforth and Mael (1989) defined it as “a specific form of social identification,” where identification is “the perception of oneness with or belongingness to a group, involving direct or vicarious experience of its successes and failures” (pp. 22, 34). As noted above, you may have felt such identification with a sports team, a club, a house of worship, your alma mater, your place of work, or any number of organizations to which you have belonged. In a moment we will look at the psychological components that Asforth and Mael (1989) ascribed to organizational identification. But first, let us review the issue from the corporate side rather than the individual side.

From the Organizational Perspective

Leaders expend much effort toward managing employees’ identification with the organization in hopes of producing a workforce that is committed and loyal. So they pay much attention to ensuring new members “learn the ropes” and are socialized into the values and practices of the organization. Fredric Jablin (1987; 2001) proposed that organizational socialization occurs in three phases: anticipatory socialization, organizational entry and assimilation, and organizational disengagement and exit. These are illustrated in Figure 7.6 below.

In the first phase, anticipatory socialization, you envision a specific job or career; this vision, according to Jablin, is likely influenced by family, media, peers, education, and any previous organizational experiences you have had. Along with environmental influences, noted Michael Kramer (2010), the process of anticipatory socialization also takes in process of being recruited and hired by a specific organization. Hiring, of course, leads to organizational entry and assimilation, the next phase of socialization. During preentry when you have been offered a job but not formally begun, you receive messages from the employer and initial impressions—both by and about you—are formed. Then during formal entry the organization strives to acclimate you to its ways, while you try to make sense of how you fit in— until you experience the metamorphosis of assimilation as an established member. Finally, the phase of organizational disengagement and exit occurs as you leave your employment. Through the first two phases in which you are recruited and hired, and then initiated and assimilated, organizations use many methods to “get you on board” and foster strong identification: new employee orientation programs, training programs, mentoring programs, information giving, and more.

From the perspective of organization leaders, the goal of the socialization is to produce employees who adopt a desirable followership style. Ira Chaleff (2003) described the ideal follower as one how supports the leader and offers corrective feedback when needed. Roger Adair (2008) contrasted the Disgruntled follower and the Disengaged follower, with the excited and motivated Doer and the self-sacrificing Disciple. Robert Presthus (1962) divided followers into Upwardly Mobiles who revel in an organization’s system, Indifferents who go along, and Ambivalents who resist. Robert Kelley (1992) proposed a typology of Alienated, Passive, Conformist, and Exemplary followers—the latter combining active engaged in an organization with independent thought and judgment for achieving organizational goals. A common thread that runs through all of these typologies is the assumption that followers should identify strongly enough with an organization to perform their duties with motivation and commit their independent thought and judgment to the service and benefit of the group.

From an Individual Perspective

Fostering organizational identification is seen by leaders as an essential management function. But for individuals, the implications are more complex. As we noted at the outset of the chapter, people in modern societies derive much of their self-identities from the organizations with which they affiliate. Evaluating the implications must start with a better understanding of organizational identity as a psychological phenomenon. Since much of the research follows Ashforth and Mael’s (1989) construct of organizational identity, then that is where we will begin.

Table 7.2 in section 7.2 illustrates how Ashforth and Mael applied to organizations the social identity theory of Tajfel and Turner—who, in turn, had built on the work of Cooley and Mead. Ashforth and Mael (1989) surveyed the extant literature and found that the term organizational identification was sometimes used interchangeably with such terms as commitment and internalization. Guided by social identity theory, they defined identification as a “cognitive construct that is not necessarily associated with any specific behaviors or affective states” since “an individual need only perceive him- or herself as psychologically intertwined with the fate of the group” and he or she “personally experienc[es] the successes and failures” (Ashforth & Mael, 1989, p. 21). In other words, your identification with a social group (such as an organization) is a mental picture rather than a set of actions or feelings. Further, identification can be distinguished from internalization: “Whereas identification refers to self in terms of social categories (I am), internalization refers to the incorporation of values, attitudes, and so forth within the self as guiding principles (I believe)” (Ashforth & Mael, 1989, pp. 21-22) Table 7.4 below puts these ideas into perspective by suggesting how an employee of the (hypothetical) Better Burgers franchise might express affinity with her organization.

Ashforth and Mael (1989) argue that social identification can drive your actions and feelings, or vice versa. But when organizational identification is understood as a specific form of social identification—and when identification is seen as a cognitive construction or mental picture of the self, rather than a set of behaviors of feelings—then social identity theory suggests five factors can push employees and managers to identify with their organizations:

• The distinctiveness of the organization, so that membership confers a unique self-identity.
• The prestige of the organization, so that membership boosts self-esteem.
• An awareness of out-groups (i.e., other organizations), so that awareness of the in-group (i.e., one’s own organization) is reinforced.
• Competition with other organizations, so that distinctions are more clearly delineated.
• Groups formation factors that may include physical proximity, interpersonal relations, attractiveness, similarity, shared background, and common threats or aspirations. (Ashforth & Mael, 1989, pp. 24–25)

Think again of the fast food chains we have used as an example throughout this chapter. If you were employed by one of these chains then (ideally, from management’s point of view) you might identify with the chain as your own self-identity becomes intertwined with its distinctiveness (“Our burgers are uniquely best!”) and prestige (“We’re the leading national chain!”) and with its contrasts to other chains (“The other chains want to be like us” and “The competitions won’t beat us because their burgers aren’t as good!”). In addition, your organizational identification might be enhanced if your restaurant is in your own neighborhood, if get along well with your manager and coworkers, and if your fellow employees are nice people who have similar personalities, background, dreams, and challenges.

For your manager—and more broadly, for the fast food chain’s corporate leadership—a prime goal is to “produce” employees with the organizational identification described above. Of course, if you like where you work and feel a sense of belonging and purpose, then your organizational identification will tend to boost your job satisfaction. But it also follows that an organization’s attempts to “manage” your identity is tied to corporate leadership’s desire for control and predictability. Phillip Tompkins and George Cheney (1985) have called this concertive control. Drawing on structuration theory (see Chapter 4), they proposed that an identity-identification duality operates within organizations. The more you are linked with other organization members that share the same premises, the more you will all cultivate like identities for yourselves and, in turn, be self-actualized by relationships with likeminded coworkers. Thus, identity and identification are both mediums and outcomes of social action. Tompkins and Cheney (1985) theorized that organizations deploy communication to control their members in five ways starting with simple control through direct and open use of power, technical control that selects the communication tools members are expected to employ, and bureaucratic control that determines formal policies and procedures members must follow. Then through cultural control organizations seek to inculcate common values and practices around which members form their interests and relationships, while through concertive control organizations induce members to discipline themselves as approved attitudes and behaviors come to seem natural and normal. As members accept these unwritten rules they in turn reinforce and reproduce them—individually and through interactions with other members—until these expectations become the very goals which motivate members and form their sense of obligation.

Tompkins and Cheney also drew on rhetorical theory (see Chapter 4), citing Kenneth Burke’s concept of identification as a process in which consubstantiation, or a sharing of substances, causes persons to identify with one another and makes persuasion possible. Identification with an organization occurs as members imbibe its premises, shape their own identities by these premises, and ultimately reason by them. They likewise drew on Aristotle’s concept of the enthymeme. Reasoning in organizations occurs syllogistically—often from a major premise, to a minor premise, to a conclusion. Enthymemic argument occurs when a premise is widely shared by an audience. A speaker merely omits that premise from the argument and thus impels the audience to fill in the missing premise and be drawn along to the speaker’s conclusion. So for example, when management and workers share the premise that profits are good for everyone, managers need only urge employees to practice “customer service excellence” and employees will supply the missing premise that “satisfied customers are repeat customers” and so be drawn along to the conclusion that making a profit is an imperative. When such identification occurs, the organization has gained concertive control over its members.

From Postmodern and Critical Perspective

Writing in the 1970s, French philosopher Michel Foucault described a fundamental change from premodern to modern societies. In the old era of kings, discipline was achieved through direct and physical punishments such as public beheadings of people who offended the order of the realm. In the present era of bureaucracies, however, discipline is achieved not through direct and physical means but through indirect and intangible means, such that people come to discipline themselves. Foucault (1977) gave the analogy of a state prison, which is an invention of modern society. Inmates are aware of the faceless, all-seeing (or “panoptic”) guard tower above them. Knowing they are not watched every moment but could be at any moment, they discipline themselves. In a modern organization the method of surveillance may not be visual means such as cameras; bureaucracies have methods of reporting and accounting that keep tabs on people. Foucault became interested in the development of the concept of “self” throughout Western history and concluded that the “self” has become one of four “technologies” that operate in the modern world. These include:

(1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permits us to use signs, meanings, symbols, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. . . . each one of them is associated with a certain type of domination. Each implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes. (Foucault, 1988, p. 18)

In Foucault’s formulation, “technologies” is not meant in the popular sense of machines but, rather, simply as ways of getting things done. Thus, modern society has ways of manipulating the physical world, of communicating, of hierarchizing human relationships (since a completely egalitarian society is an impossibility), and of modifying the self (since living with other people makes the unmodified self an impossibility). Each way of getting things done implies submission to the larger historical and cultural discourses that are the dominant discourses in a given society. Numerous scholars in organization studies have applied Foucault’s ideas to organizational settings (Burrell, 1988; McKinlay & Starkey, 1998). Thus, as Mike Savage (1998) demonstrated in his study of a major nineteenth century railroad, employees readily disciplined themselves in return for pay increases and a career ladder that offered upward mobility. Foucault himself examined the implications of his thesis and argued that individuals, when confronted with pressures by dominant discourses to modify their selves, could respond ethnically by asking four questions:

1. Ethical substance: Which part of myself or my behavior is influenced or concerned with moral conduct? What do I do because I want to be ethical?
2. Mode of subjection: How am I being told to act morally? Who is asking? To whose values am I being subjected?
3. Ethical work: How must I change myself or my actions in order to become ethical in this situation?
4. Ethical goal: Do I agree with this definition of morality? Do I consent to becoming this character in this situation? To what am I aspiring to when I behave ethically? (Faber, 1999; Foucault, 1984; Moore, 1987).

While Foucault’s ideas provide a framework for many scholars to explore questions of the self in organizational settings, Matts Alvesson and Hugh Willmott (2002) took their own critical look starting with the literature—reviewed above—on organizational identity and identification. They argued that management engages in identity regulation as a form of organizational control in order to “produce” the “appropriate” individuals that management desires. Identity regulation, believed Alvesson and Willmott, is accomplished as management promulgates a discourse that defines identity and thus shapes processes of identity formation and change. This managerial discourse addresses four targets and is conducted in nine modes, as shown in Table 7.5 below.

Thus, identity regulation “encompasses the more or less intentional effects of social practices upon processes of identity construction and reconstruction” and includes “induction, training, and promotion procedures [that] are developed in ways that have implications for the shaping and direction of identity” (Alvesson & Willmott, 1989, p. 625). These practices are intended to influence what Alvesson and Willmott (1989) call the identity work that all members do to ascertain the nature of the organization and their parts in it. This identity work explores six aspects of self-identity: central life interest, coherence, distinctiveness, direction, positive value, and self-awareness. In particular:

• A person’s central life interest is bound up in the questions of “Who am I?” and “What are we?”
• The desire for coherence is felt as a need to tell one’s life story as a narrative with a discernible sequence rather than a fragmented jumble of random events
• The desire for distinctiveness is akin to the need, discussed earlier in the chapter, to set boundaries that distinguish “me” from others
• Direction provides a (if often vague) basis of what is appropriate, desired, and valued on which a person can decide what is reasonable
• A set of positive social values lend self-esteem to a person’s identity
• A person gains a self-identity, in part, when he or she has acquired a self-awareness of that identity.

Thus, identity work is the process by which “people are continuously engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening, or revising the constructions that are productive of a precarious sense of coherence and distinctiveness” (Alvesson & Willmott, 1989, p. 626). Having defined the three concepts of identity regulation, identity work and self-identity, Alvesson and Willmott (1989) saw them working in a dynamic relation as shown in Figure 7.7 below. Their conclusion: identity is “an important yet still insufficiently explored dimension of organizational control,” and one whose importance will increase in a post-bureaucratic world of loosely networked organizations where control must be accomplished by managing the “insides” of employees (Alvesson & Willmott, 1989, p. 620).

References:

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