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

The Business Week Rankings As an Organizational Identity Threat

Business Week magazine has ranked the top-20 U.S. business schools every two years since 1988. The survey evaluates business schools on two primary criteria: (1) recent Master of Business Administration (MBA) graduates' satisfaction with the school and (2) recruiters' satisfaction with recent graduates of the school. Business Week uses a composite score of these two dimensions to evaluate and rank the top-20 U.S. business schools. Our preliminary readings and interviews suggested that, prior to the Business Week rankings, the absence of a dominant standard for evaluating business schools, along with the wide variety of possibly distinct niches, enabled schools to decide which identity attributes were important and with whom they should be compared. By imposing an ostensibly objective and uniform metric for evaluating all U.S. business schools, the Business Week rankings dramatically disrupted the status quo that these schools had long enjoyed, creating an organizational identity threat for some institutions. Early interviews suggested that this new ranking metric posed a two-pronged threat to many members' perceptions of their business schools' identities. First, the survey often devalued central and distinctive dimensions of a school's identity. Second, in many instances, it challenged members' prior claims about the positional status of their schools.

Devaluing core identity dimensions. Our pilot investigations suggested that the Business Week rankings threatened some members' perceptions of their organization's identity by calling into question the merit or importance of core, distinctive, and enduring organizational traits associated with their institutions. For example, in emphasizing MBAs' satisfaction with teaching as a primary evaluative criteria, Business Week implicitly challenged the value of many schools' longstanding research mission. Moreover, according to several business school admissions directors, as the rankings received increasing attention and achieved greater legitimacy with students, recruiters, and alumni, dimensions of a school's identity that were not included in the survey became perceived as less important and perhaps even irrelevant as indicators of a school's performance or quality. As one MBA student put it, "I don't need 'balanced excellence' [between teaching and research] in my program. I came here to benefit from research, not support it." Notwithstanding the shortsightedness of this view, by excluding certain historically important and enduring institutional characteristics, the Business Week survey threatened the core identities of many business schools, even those ranked near the top.

Such threats to identity value may be, in some respects, a unique consequence of the particular methodology used to generate the Business Week rankings. Our preliminary investigation suggested that, prior to the first Business Week survey, many business schools took pride in touting what they perceived as valuable attributes and distinctive competencies. For example, MBA catalogs from the University of Chicago and Stanford University business schools frequently drew attention to their excellent research faculty, noting their impressive record of scholarly accomplishments. By contrast, descriptions of other prominent business schools, such as Dartmouth and Cornell, frequently alluded to their close-knit communities and "user-friendly" MBA cultures. Although other surveys of business schools have existed for some time (e.g., Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, Peterson's Guide to American Colleges, Brecker and Merryman Inc.'s Survey of U.S. Business Schools, and U.S. News and World Report), none were perceived to have clear dominance or compelling merit within the business school community. In addition, the criteria for evaluating schools differed: Some drew distinctions between private vs. public institutions; others collapsed across such distinctions (cf. Hay, 1992). As a result, schools could select which surveys and which attributes to emphasize in their own evaluation.