Identity and the Modern Organization

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Caroline Bartel, Steven L. Blader, Amy Wrzesniewski
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007 - Social Science - 285 pages

Identity and the Modern Organization presents a lively exchange of ideas among psychology and management scholars on the realities of modern organizational life and their effect on the identities that organizations and their members cultivate. This book bridges the domains of psychology and management to facilitate a multi-disciplinary, multi-level integration of theory and research on identity processes.

The volume highlights answers to important questions raised by shifting organizational forms and arrangements, such as:

  • How are identity processes affected by, and how do they affect, the motivations of individuals and organizations?
  • How do identity and identification shape the social processes that unfold between individuals and groups?
  • How do strong versus weak contexts affect identity processes as the boundaries of organizations and social categories within them become more permeable?

An effective tool for understanding a wide variety of organizational phenomena, this book is intended for scholars and students in the fields of management, organizational theory, organizational behavior, social psychology, and industrial/organizational psychology.

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About the author (2007)

Caroline Bartel is an assistant professor of Organizational Behavior at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her master's and Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the informal and interactive processes through which individuals and groups coordinate their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at work. One stream of her current work focuses on social identity processes, including the ways in which identity and status are negotiated in social interactions and how these processes affect behavior that promotes coordinated action. 
Steven Blader is an assistant professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from New York University. His research aims to understand the impact of employee's social and relational concerns in the work place. In particular, his work focuses on understanding how people assess their social standing in their work organizations, and the influence of those judgments on their judgments and behavior. He is currently investigating these issues by examining employee perceptions of the fairness they experience at work, the role of status in organizational life, and the extent to which work organizations constitute an important part of how people think and feel about themselves. 
Amy Wrzesniewski is an associate professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, where she studies the meaning of work and teaches courses on careers and on teams in organizations. She received her master's and Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on how people make meaning of their work in difficult contexts (e.g., stigmatized occupations, virtual work, absence of work), and the experience of work as a job, career, or calling. Her current research involves studying how employees shape their interactions and relationships with others in the workplace to change both their work identity and the meaning of the job.   

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