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Although aspects of social identity theory are familiar to organizational psychologists, its elaboration, through self-categorization theory, of how social categorization and prototype-based depersonalization actually produce social identity effects is less well known. We describe these processes, relate self-categorization theory to social identity theory, describe new theoretical developments in detail, and show how these developments can address a range of organizational phenomena. We discuss cohesion and deviance, leadership. subgroup and sociodemographic structure, and mergers and acquisitions.
Organizations are internally structured groups that are located in complex networks of intergroup relations characterized by power, status, and prestige differentials. To varying degrees, people derive part of their identity and sense of self from the organizations or workgroups to which they belong. Indeed, for many people their professional and/or organizational identity may be more pervasive and important than ascribed identities based on gender, age, ethnicity, race, or nationality. It is perhaps not surprising that social psychologists who study groups often peek over the interdisciplinary fence at what their colleagues in organizational psychology are up to. Some, disillusioned with social cognition as the dominant paradigm in mainstream social psychology, vault the fence, thus fueling recent and not so recent laments within social psychology that the study of groups may be alive and well, but not in social psychology (e.g., Levine & Moreland, 1990; Steiner, 1974).
Over the past 10 or 15 years, however, there has been a marked revival of interest among social psychologists in the study of groups and group processes (e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1998; Hogg & Abrams, 1999; Hogg & Moreland, 1995; Moreland, Hogg, & Hains, 1994), even spawning two new journals: Group Dynamics in 1996 and Group Processes and Intergroup Relations in 1998. The new interest in groups is different. There is less emphasis on interactive small groups, group structure, and interpersonal relations within groups, and there is more emphasis on the self concept: how the self is defined by group membership and how social cognitive processes associated with group membershipbased self-definition produce characteristically "groupy" behavior. This revival of interest in group processes and identity has been influenced significantly by the development within social psychology of social identity theory and self -categorization theory. A search of PsychLit in mid 1997 for the key terms social...