Organizational Identification - Organization Identity and Identification and Management Control

Organization Identity and Identification and Management Control

Issues of control are found in most activities at most levels of organizational life (Larson and Tompkins, 2005). Organizations can exercise simple control (direct, authoritative), technological control, and bureaucratic control (through rules and rationality). The most powerful forms of control in an organization may be those that are the least obvious or "that are 'fully unobtrusive' that 'control the cognitive premises underlying action'" (Perrow 1979 quoted in Larson and Tompkins, 2005).

Barker calls the control described above 'concertive control,' and he believes that it largely grows out of self-managing teams who base decisions on a set of shared values and high-level coordination by the team members themselves (1993). Concertive control, even though employee directed, actually increases the total amount of control in an organizational system because each worker is watching and correcting others (Tompkins, 2005), rather than one manager watching and directing the behavior of many.

One insidious, almost fully unobtrusive form of control is the organization's attempt to regulate employee identity and identification. Alvesson and Willmott (2001) explore how employee identities are regulated inside of an organization so that their self-images and work processes and products line up with management goals and objectives. Identity regulation is the "intentional effects of social practices upon processes of identity construction and reconstruction" (Alvesson and Willmott, 2001). The authors suggest that when an organization and its rules and procedures, particularly in training and promotion, become "a significant source of identification for individuals" the organizational identity is then at the core of that individual's "(self-) identity work" (Alvesson and Willmott, 2001). The conscious effort, either by the organization or the individual, to align self-image with organizational goals is organizational identification, and OI can bound an employee's decision making in a way that keeps it "compatible with affirming such identification" (Tompkins and Cheney, 1985).

Pratt (2000) talks about strong organizational values or culture and the effect a strong culture has on identification and commitment. Strong values can act as social control mechanisms, can hold together dispersed groups of workers (those that are not co-located) and can secure employee commitment in a working environment where "job security no longer serves as the cornerstone of psychological contract in the workplace" (Kanter quoted in Pratt, 2000). The strong values are what the workers identify with or commit to.

Organizations can manage organizational identification by managing how individuals form personal values and identities, and how those values cause them to approach relationships inside and outside of work (Pratt 2000). Organizations can do this by "creating a need for meaning via sensebreaking" (Pratt, 2000) by causing people to question their ‘old’ values against the new, better values and dreams offered by the company.

So, controlling identity and identification benefits the company because it makes for more satisfied employees who stay longer and work harder. Identity regulation by organizations can be seen through efforts to manage organizational culture through communicated values in mission and vision statements. Organizations can also create a vacuum and then a perceived need among employees for goals and values provided by the organization through sense/dream-breaking and dream-building (Pratt, 2000). Finally, organizations can attempt to shape the values and identities of the workforce through self-help programs selected and instituted by the organization in the workplace, although controlling exactly how these programs are interpreted and applied can be difficult (Carlone and Larson, 2006).