Entry number 2, week 3 – Identity in a Post Merger Environment and its Effects on Collaboration

Our group has elected to carry over an idea from last week and think more about it within the context of identity literature. We remain intrigued with the prospect of harnessing the strong bonds formed in the Darden MBA learning teams to test hypotheses in a post merger context.

One thing that occurred to us this week is that the data source may be leading our research a bit. Some of the research around identity is based on the presupposition that people behave in certain ways to advance their careers. For example, Ibarra suggested that one adjusts one’s identity to take on the characteristics of successful superiors in order to succeed in a new role. Clearly a post merger environment presents fertile ground for inquiry around this topic. However, with a Darden learning team there is no “promotion” dynamic. There is also a defined end point. The learning team’s primary function is output and collaboration for one year.

If we are focused on exploring what we can learn about personality, identity and collaboration in a post merger context leveraging the learning teams, clearly there is a distinction in our inquiry that we need to make at this point. Our research (assuming it is based on Darden learning teams) is somewhat constrained by the subject base. It should yield insights into collaboration in a post merger environment. It potentially will yield new insights into the impacts of collective or group identity on group performance. To the extent that identity exploration is tied to career advancement psychologically, it may not yield new insights into identity experimentation because learning team members are not operating with a longer-term perspective[1]. However, it may show that that any number of factors (image, reputation, stereotypes) in a post merger context influences team identity and thus individual identity.

There are two valuable outcomes from this dynamic. The first is that there is value in the exercise, for us and for others potentially. The artifact of this blog may be valuable to future students as they think through research structure. The second is that constraints provided by restricting our pool of data have forced us to focus our area of inquiry.

Thus, we will attempt to apply some of the implications from this week’s reading on identity to further hone our expected outcomes from a study involving merging Darden learning teams. But we won’t attempt to apply all of them.

In “Who Is This “We”? Levels of Collective Identity and Self Representations”, Brewster and Gardner highlight a distinction between group identities that are “based on common bonds (attachment to other group members) and those based on common identity (collective identities).” (Prentice, Miller, and Lightdale, 1994) We hypothesize that both versions may already be present in our MBA learning teams. Therefore we could screen for preexisting identity constructs. A questionnaire, which probes for the respondent’s view of how the learning team views itself and how he/she views his/herself within the learning team could be effective. This questionnaire could simply read:

1. Name and learning team number:
2. Do you feel your learning team has a collective identity? (yes or no)
3. Would you say that you identify yourself in relation to the other members of your team as A: a functional participant (i.e. the “accounting person,” the “scheduling person,” “the high energy member,” etc.), B: simply a member of learning team X, or C: none of the above

The research suggests that group/self identity framing could be manipulated by priming research subjects with language and experiment setup (Ibarra 1999, Brewer & Gardner 1996, etc). Thus, an alternative would be to prime our respondents by writing three different introductions to the experiment: one in which the individual is highlighted (heavy use of individual words, your objective is x, you need to show that you can y, etc.); one in which the interpersonal is highlighted (i.e. dividing the group into functional roles); and one in which the collective is highlighted (heavy use of team-oriented phrase structure, and emphasis on framing learning team x versus another learning team). Each member of a learning team would be given the same version and instructed to read it together (or alone depending on our intent for priming) before the experiment began.

Our inclination is to employ priming for this study. One reason is that since MBA students are taught to think critically, they may read into the intent of the screening questionnaire. The literature this week argues that people switch between identity framing based on the environment presented, and we may unintentionally tap into this. A second issue with a screening questionnaire is that if participants fill them out alone, they could tend to skew respondents towards framing the exercise within the individual sense of self. If we ask teams to fill them out in a group setting, the opposite would be true. In essence, the context of the questionnaire is a form of priming, and a weaker form than we should be able to design intentionally.

An interesting dynamic the learning teams also provide is that most of them will have well-defined group roles, which will have been formed and tested over an intense period of months. Ideally we can observe the groups and note roles in a pre test and then observe if roles are maintained in a merged environment. Additionally, we may observe changes in personality in a post merger environment. An outgoing participant may become introverted in a new environment. Similarly, a participant who was overshadowed in an old construct may blossom in a new one.

These musings suggest that we may be most effective using an inductive, grounded theory development process (Glasser and Strauss, 1967, Eisenhart, 1989). While we will have ingoing hypotheses that would lend themselves to quantitative testing, the opportunity to have a group of subjects whom we could observe every night over a period of months would indicate that observation would yield some rich data. (We could also introduce a pre and post questionnaire to get a sense of how participants felt things “changed” in the post merger environment).

This study becomes more complicated when we introduce ideas of company name identity (through naming of the merged entity) and collective/self identity. Clearly both will have effects on group interaction in a post merger environment, and both could yield valuable insights for managers. More of this will become clear in later weeks when we explore issues around culture and power & politics.

Our hypotheses (informed by the literature and objective thought) are based on the notion that the name of the merged entity will have direct effects on post merger collaboration in a team setting. Specifically, we believe that the way a learning team is named will have an effect on how the members view themselves in relation to those outside the group. When collective identities are present, in-group, out-group categorizations become the most significant basis for categorizing others (Shih, etal., 1999). This categorization effect will lead to the designation of control of the merged entity, and thereby potentially hinder the performance of some members in the group – specifically those who are identified as “acquired”.[2] We also expect that categorizations by the acquiring group of the acquired as “other” and vice versa will discourage collaboration.

Specifically, we hypothesize that:

1. Members from the team that gets to “keep” its name (i.e. the acquirer) will tend to contribute more to meetings and potentially dominate them at the expense of the value of ideas from the acquired. We will test this with collective, relative and individual framing to see if they have an effect.
2. Members of the team that takes the combined name will show similar legacy issues as the first scenario. We will also test this with collective, relative and individual framing to see if they have an effect.
3. The teams that are renamed with no legacy frame of reference will establish new structures, roles, identities, and will collaborate more effectively.

Assuming it would be difficult to convince CEOs of companies with significant brand equity, it would be very interesting to try multiple scenarios with hypothesis A to test around how managers could potentially use framing or priming techniques to break down collective identities before initiating post-merger integration. If documents and corporate emails, etc. informing employees emphasize the individual self, perhaps collective identities can be suppressed at the company level (at least temporarily until the new groups have formed and new organizing activities have stabilized).

Unfortunately we would not be able to observe these dynamics over a significant period of time. Our conclusions, therefore will have to be either framed around the forming of new groups in a post merger environment, or (ideally) there will be secondary literature which can offer predictive information about what early group dynamics imply for the longer term.

However, if we can allow the groups to remain together for multiple sessions we may be able to make some conclusions about how they would function going forward. (One option could be to allow members to defect after the initial meeting, which could be used to draw inferences about HSM’s and LSM’s depending on who defects). Regardless, a few sessions of observation and one session of post-merger group task should provide some interesting data with which we can inform future inquiry.

Perhaps next week we can look at identity construction research and combine it with next week’s theme (culture) to think about those two and their effects on collaboration in a post merger environment. It was intriguing to imagine how personality differences (specifically high/low EI and HSM/LSM) would impact collaboration in a post merger environment when cultural assimilation is an important/valued skill.

---

[1] Ibarra’s provisional self process could be present despite the learning team’s short lifespan and lack of promotion drive. The promotion equivalent in learning comes in the form of improved grades/comprehension that could be spurred on by students interacting differently with their peers, e.g. taking lead in conversations, deferring leadership to others. It’s not inconceivable that individual selves may converge towards a team model.

[2] An arbitrary merger between two groups could possibly be too transparent of a construct for these MBAs because they may see through the game. Therefore there should be some form of pre-conceived power assignments ascribed to the ‘acquiring’ team. For example, the team that performed better on an assigned task could be inconspicuously labeled the “acquiring” company. This would add another element of realism to the construct. Alternatively, we could pre assign logical reasons as to “why” a merger was undertaken. I.e. team X acquired team Y specifically for person Z from team Y, or team Y was acquired due to poor management practices and team X intends to apply its market-proven formulae. In many real cases, employees will be acutely aware of these details due to the roles financial journalism plays in communicating merger logic.