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We study whether group identity mitigates inefficiencies associated with appropriable quasi-rents, which are often created by relationship-specific investments in bilateral trade relationships. We conjecture that group identity strengthens the effect of an agent’s generous action in increasing his trade partner’s altruistic preferences, and this effect helps reduce incentives to undertake ex-post inefficient opportunistic behavior such as investment in an outside option. Our experimental results, however, do not support this conjecture, and contrast with our previous experimental findings that group identity mitigates distortions in ex-ante efficient relation-specific investment. We discuss a possible cause of the difference and its implications for the theory of the firm.

This chapter describes a theory of intergroup leadership. Research on reducing prejudice and intergroup conflict identifies a number of conditions, such as empathy, shared goals, crossed categorization, recategorization, and intergroup contact, which can be beneficial. It also identifies social identity threat as a stumbling block – processes intended to reduce conflict often threaten people’s sense of having a unique and distinctive social identity and thus provoke a defensive reaction that sustains conflict. But social psychology says little about the role of group leadership in conflict resolution.

I summarize what we know from social psychology about conditions that attenuate intergroup conflict; then focus on social identity and influence processes to present a new theory of leadership across conflicting groups.

Prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction rests on effective messaging and influence, which is often a matter of intergroup leadership where a leader must bridge and integrate warring factions within a superordinate entity. The challenge of intergroup leadership is to construct an intergroup relational identity that focuses on collaboration and avoids identity threat. I describe a model of intergroup leadership and discuss strategies, such as identity rhetoric, boundary spanning and leadership coalition-building, that such leadership should adopt to effectively reconstruct social identity to reduce conflict and prejudice between groups.

This is a development and extension of a more narrowly focused theory of intergroup leadership in organizational contexts. It will be of value to social psychology, the behavioral and social sciences, and those seeking to reduce prejudice and intergroup conflict through leadership.

The relationship between intergroup conflict and intragroup cohesion is a longstanding concern in sociology and related disciplines. Past work suggests that intergroup conflict shapes emotional bonds between group members, promotes in-group and out-group stereotyping, encourages self-sacrifice for the group, and changes the social structure of groups. Conflict thus plays an important structural role in organizing social interaction. Although sociologists contributed much to the beginnings of this research tradition, sociological attention to the conflict–cohesion link has waned in recent decades. We contend that despite advances in our understanding of the conflict–cohesion hypothesis, more remains to be done, and sociologists are especially equipped to tackle these unanswered questions. As such, we encourage sociologists to revisit the study of intergroup conflict and intragroup cohesion and offer some possibilities for furthering our understanding of this phenomenon. After reviewing and evaluating the relevant literatures on the conflict–cohesion hypothesis, we consider ways in which a broad range of current theories from the group process tradition – including theories of status, exchange, justice, identity, and emotion – could contribute to understanding the conflict–cohesion hypothesis and how those theories could benefit from considering the conflict–cohesion hypothesis. In doing so, we make a case for the continuing importance of sociology in explaining the link between intergroup conflict and intragroup cohesion.

In this chapter, we explore the importance of morality in groups. We draw from decades of research from multiple perspectives, including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and organizational science, to illustrate the range of ways that morality influences social attitudes and group behavior. After synthesizing the literature, we identify promising directions for business ethics scholars to pursue. We specifically call for greater research on morality at the meso, or group, level of analysis and encourage studies examining the complex relationship between moral emotions and the social environment. We ultimately hope that this work will provide new insights for managing moral behavior in groups and society.

Now well into the 21st century, the world’s most powerful organizations’ highest executive levels and boards of directors still fail to represent a diverse collection of people shaped by unique social identity dimensions according to age, class, culture, ethnicity, faith/spirituality, gender, physical/psychological ability, sexual orientation, and more. Offered in this book is an investigation into why a homophily framework, or a similarity-attraction hypothesis, continues to perpetuate leadership by predominantly Caucasian/White males and reinforces barriers that keep qualified people possessing a multiplicity of social identity dimensions from achieving their full human potential.

To understand interactive processes through which discrimination is reproduced in the workplace, social identity theorists explore connections between ways that people create social identity and that organizations become socially constructed. Social identity theory explains how people seek to develop oneness with groups that help them to develop and/or to enhance positive self-esteem – and to better understand how people develop notions of high-status ingroups and low-status outgroups. Both of these frameworks are central to this book’s attention to difference in organizations. Difference is positioned as a positive advance in organizational dynamics; advocating respect and appreciation for multiple and intersecting social identities – not for profitability and other business case reasons – but because it is morally justified to eradicate inequitable and exclusionary practices in organizations. This book offers an introduction to doing difference research by introducing a number of theoretical underpinnings, addressing methodological challenges, and presenting a wide cross-section of numerous bodies of literature which have been attending to difference work. Chapter 1 is divided into subthemes of: applying social identity theory, emphasizing the “center” and the “margin,” managing organizational climate, and avoiding business case thinking and other flawed models by advocating for real diversity.

A social identity analysis, based on Hogg's (2000) uncertainty reduction theory, of the emergence and maintenance of ideological belief systems is presented. Uncertainty, particularly self-uncertainty, motivates identification with high-entitativity groups and behaviors that promote entitativity. Under more extreme uncertainty, identification is more pronounced and entitativity can be associated with orthodoxy, hierarchy and extremism, and with ideological belief systems. I develop and describe a social identity and uncertainty reduction analysis of ideology, and contextualize this in a brief discussion of the concept of ideology and in coverage of other contemporary social psychological treatments of ideology, such as social dominance theory, system justification theory, right-wing authoritarianism, belief in a just world, and the protestant work ethic.

This chapter describes a two-year comparative study in two investment banking departments that investigated the relationship between identification, shared cognition, and group performance. The data replicates previous research that found a positive relationship between group members’ subjective experience of unity with their group, shared cognition, and group performance. However, in contrast to previous research, we found that identification did not facilitate but undermined such a subjective experience of unity. Identification, therefore, impeded shared cognition and group performance, as compared to an alternative way in which bankers experienced unity that we refer to as direct involvement.

We discuss the implementation of workshops for faculty search committees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A central focus of the workshops is to introduce faculty to research on the influence of unconscious bias on the evaluation of job candidates and to recommend evidence-based strategies for minimizing this bias. The workshops aim to help universities achieve their goals of recruiting excellent and diverse faculty.

With basic descriptive statistics and a simple logistic regression analysis, we utilize several datasets to examine participants’ responses to the workshop and assess changes in the percentage of women who receive offers and accept positions.

Faculty members are becoming aware of the role bias can play in evaluating faculty applicants and are learning strategies for minimizing bias. In departments where women are underrepresented, workshop participation is associated with a significant increase in the odds of making a job offer to a woman candidate, and with a non-significant increase in the odds of hiring a woman.

This study is limited by our inability to assess the diversity of the applicant pools our faculty search committees recruit and by lack of control over the myriad other factors that influence hiring. Data are from a single institution and therefore these results may not generalize to other universities.

Educating faculty search committees about the role of unconscious bias and presenting them with evidence-based strategies for minimizing its influence promotes changes that contribute to increasing representation of women faculty.