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

Another consequence of highlighting selective categorizations is that it influences the salience of interpersonal or intergroup comparisons.(1) As social identity theorists have noted, people can enhance their social identities by highlighting their membership in categories that are widely viewed as high status in comparison with other categories (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Hogg and Abrams, 1988; Hinkle and Brown, 1990). Members of low-status groups may improve their relative status by selecting different groups with which to be compared. For example, studies have shown that, in response to threats to self-esteem, people sometimes invoke categorization schemes that highlight downward social comparisons to those who are worse off on some dimension (i.e., "I may have breast cancer, but at least I didn't have a double mastectomy") (Wood, Taylor, and Lichtman, 1985). In other cases, they may invoke categorization schemes that highlight similarities to highly performing others to improve perceptions of their status (Wheeler, 1966).

A variety of laboratory experiments provide evidence that highlighting selective categorizations and social comparisons affects people's self-perceptions (e.g., Tajfel, 1969; Kramer and Brewer, 1984; Gaertner et al., 1989, 1990). This notion also receives strong support from recent and closely related research on self-affirmation (Steele, 1988) and constructive social comparison processes (Goethals, Messick, and Allison, 1991). The portrait of the individual that emerges is that of a cognitively flexible, adaptive, and opportunistic social perceiver, one who responds to identity-threatening events by highlighting personal membership in select social categories to make salient his or her positive identity attributes, favorable status among peers, and favorable similarity or uniqueness relative to others. Yet this research has not discussed members' attempts to highlight selectively their organization's membership in favorable categories following events that threaten their organization's identity, nor do current models of social identity or self-affirmation describe any of the cognitive tactics members may use to affirm perceptions of their organization's identity following events that call into question or devalue their organization's central, distinctive, and enduring traits.

The above shortcomings in organizational theories of impression management and psychological theories of social identity, coupled with our preliminary findings about members' responses to the Business Week rankings, suggest that our understanding of the relationship between organizational identities and members' social identities may be enhanced by an investigation of members' responses to organizational identity-threatening events. We describe such an investigation in the following sections of this paper.

METHODS

We conducted a study of business school members' responses to the 1992 Business Week rankings of U.S. business schools. Although we reviewed data from the 1988 and 1990 Business Week rankings as well, we focused on the 1992 Business Week rankings because (1) complete records data were not available from earlier rankings, and (2) we were interested in assessing current organizational members' contemporaneous reactions to the rankings. We collected data for this study from January 1993 through December 1993.