Content area
Full Text
We develop a model of organizational identity construction that reframes organizational identity within the broader context of manager-stakeholder relationships and more effectively integrates theory on organizational identity and organizational identification. We describe organizational identity as emerging from complex, dynamic, and reciprocal interactions among managers, organizational members, and other stakeholders. The model draws attention to organizational identity as negotiated cognitive images and to the embeddedness of organizational identity within different systems of organizational membership and meaning. Viewing organizational identity from the perspective of manager-stakeholder relationships provides a more parsimonious but more complete theory of organizational identity management.
Organizational identity is that which is central, distinctive, and enduring about an organization (Albert & Whetten, 1985). Dutton, Dukerich, and Harquail (1994) have defined organizational identity, at the individual level, as a cognitive image held by a member of an organization. Others have suggested that organizational identity, although variously perceived, has a reality independent of individual members and that its significance depends on a collective audience, among whom there is some level of consensus-albeit how much remains in question (Albert, personal communication, 1998). For those with this latter perspective, organizational identity is a collectively held frame within which organizational participants make sense of their world (Weick, 1995). Similar to legitimacy (Suchman, 1995), organizational identity is objectively held-that is, it has a reality independent of individual observersalthough it is subjectively arrived at.
In the literature scholars view organizational identity as distinct from organizational image, which they have variously defined as the way organizational members believe others see their organization (i.e., construed external image; Dutton et al., 1994), as the way that top management would like outsiders to see the organization (i.e., desired image; Whetten, Lewis, & Mischel, 1992), and as the overall impression that companies make on external constituents (i.e., reputation; Bromley, 1993). Gioia and Thomas (1996) have observed that the common thread among various definitions is that image reflects external appraisals of the organization, whereas identity represents the perceptions of organizational insiders. Yet, as Dutton and Dukerich (1991) so effectively documented in their study of the New York Port Authority, organizational identity and organizational image are closely related to each other.
Theory and research suggest that members' identities and organizational identity are closely linked (e.g., Ashforth & Mael,...