Members' responses to organizational identity threats: encountering and countering the Business Week rankings

Administrative Science Quarterly, Sept, 1996 by Kimberly D. Elsbach, Roderick M. Kramer

This research investigates how organizational members respond to events that threaten their perceptions of their organization's identity. Using qualitative, interview, and records data, we describe how members from eight "top-20" business schools responded to the 1992 Business Week survey rankings of U.S. business schools. Our analysis suggests that the rankings posed a two-pronged threat to many members' perceptions of their schools' identities by (1) calling into question their perceptions of highly valued, core identity attributes of their schools, and (2) challenging their beliefs about their schools' standing relative to other schools. In response, members made sense of these threats and affirmed positive perceptions of their school's identity by emphasizing and focusing on their school's membership in selective organizational categories that highlighted favorable identity dimensions and interorganizational comparisons not recognized by the rankings. Data suggest that members' use of these categorization tactics depended on the level of identity dissonance they felt following the rankings. We integrate these findings with insights from social identity, self-affirmation, and impression management theories to develop a new framework of organizational identity management.(*)

Out of the four billion people on earth, everyone in our class

must be in at least the most fortunate two-tenths of one percent.

But we figure if this school were ranked first or second instead

of ninth [by the Business Week survey], we'd be in the top

one-tenth of one percent, so we're all pissed off.

--Stanford MBA, responding to the 1990 Business Week

rankings of U.S. business schools (quoted in Robinson, 1995:

189; emphasis in original)

An organization's identity reflects its central and distinguishing attributes, including its core values, organizational culture, modes of performance, and products (Albert and Whetten, 1985; Dutton and Dukerich, 1991; Whetten, Lewis, and Mischel, 1992). For members, organizational identity may be conceptualized as their cognitive schema or perception of their organization's central and distinctive attributes, including its positional status and relevant comparison groups (Dutton and Penner, 1993; Kramer, 1993; Dutton, Dukerich, and Harquail, 1994). Consequently, external events that refute or call into question these defining characteristics may threaten members' perceptions of their organization's identity (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991). For example, journalists have recently criticized the socially responsible firm, the Body Shop, for exploiting the very populations it was supposedly serving. Such criticisms may threaten members' perceptions of what the organization is and what it stands for.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how organization members respond to such identity-threatening events, which represent a symbolic and sensemaking dilemma for organization members that is distinct from most previously studied organizational image threats (i.e., events that threaten members' perceptions of an organization) (cf. Weick, 1993; Elsbach, 1994; Dutton, Dukerich, and Harquail, 1994). While most existing research on organizational image management has focused on how formal spokespersons use impression management tactics to improve external perceptions of the organization following controversies arising from what an organization has done (i.e., verbal accounts following public health crises, scandals, and accidents) (Sutton and Callahan, 1987; Marcus and Goodman, 1991; Elsbach, 1994), we propose that organizational identity threats cause organization members to use cognitive tactics to maintain both personal and external perceptions of what their organization is or stands for.

Dutton, Dukerich, and Harquail (1994) recently proposed that it is important to distinguish between two types of organizational identity perceptions: (1) members' perceived organizational identity (i.e., what members themselves believe are the central, distinctive, and enduring attributes of their organization) and (2) their construed external identity (i.e., what members think outsiders believe are the central, distinctive, and enduring attributes of their organization). From the standpoint of the present analysis, it is important to note that perceived organizational identity and construed external organizational identity are both cognitive representations held by individual members, and both may be affected by external attributions of organizational identity. When we speak of members' identity perceptions, therefore, we are referring to both their perceived organizational identity and their construed external identity. Similarly, when we speak of tactics used to affirm identity perceptions, we are referring to tactics that affirm both perceived and construed identities.

Using this conceptual perceptive, as well as insights from social identity theory (Ashforth and Mael, 1989), self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988), and impression management theory (Tedeschi, 1981; Tedeschi and Melburg, 1984, Elsbach, 1994), we develop a framework of members' responses to organizational identity threats that emerged from a qualitative examination we did of business school members' responses to Business Week magazine's rankings of U.S. business schools. As we describe below, our preliminary examination of these responses, as reported in the popular business press (Putka, 1990; Hall, 1990; Hay, 1992), in casual conversations with colleagues and students at a few top business schools, and in an initial interview with survey founder John Byrne, suggested that the Business Week rankings threatened many members' perceptions of their school's central and distinctive attributes, i.e., their school's identity.