Crossing the Divide

Intergroup Leadership in a World of Difference

Todd L. Pittinsky

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781422118344
• eBook ISBN: 9781422152676
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Bringing groups together is a central and unrelenting task of leadership. CEOs must nudge their executives to rise above divisional turf battles, mayors try to cope with gangs in conflict, and leaders of many countries face the realities of sectarian violence.Crossing the Divide introduces cutting-edge research and insight into these age-old problems. Edited by Todd Pittinsky of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, this collection of essays brings together two powerful scholarly disciplines: intergroup relations and leadership. What emerges is a new mandate for leaders to reassess what have been regarded as some very successful tactics for building group cohesion. Leaders can no longer just "rally the troops." Instead they must employ more positive means to span boundaries, affirm identity, cultivate trust, and collaborate productively.In this multidisciplinary volume, highly regarded business scholars, social psychologists, policy experts, and interfaith activists provide not only theoretical frameworks around these ideas, but practical tools and specific case studies as well. Examples from around the world and from every sector - corporate, political, and social - bring to life the art and practice of intergroup leadership in the twenty-first century.

part I

Insights and Concepts

1

Leadership Across Group Divides

The Challenges and Potential of
Common Group Identity

John F. Dovidio
Yale University

Samuel L. Gaertner
University of Delaware

Marika J. Lamoreaux
Georgia State University

GROUP LIVING represents a fundamental survival strategy, developed across human evolutionary history, that characterizes the human species. For long-term survival, people must be willing to rely on others for information, aid, and shared resources; they must also be willing to offer information, give assistance, and share resources with others. Group membership provides necessary boundaries for mutual aid and cooperation.

Group boundaries, however, also have fundamental intergroup consequences. Whether they are defined by culture, race or ethnicity, or role within an organization, group boundaries distinguish who is “in” from who is “out.” Moreover, interactions between groups involve greater greed, fear, and mistrust than interactions between individuals. As a consequence, conflict between groups is a ubiquitous phenomenon. It characterizes all cultures and has been a central theme across all of human history. Yet cooperation and harmony between members of different groups are critical not only within societies and organizations but also for global stability and productivity. How can leaders effectively shepherd members of different groups to work cooperatively rather than competitively and place the collective welfare over their own group’s gain?

This chapter focuses on how leaders can bring together different groups, with different perspectives and often mutual mistrust, in stable and productive relations. In this chapter, we examine the importance of social identity, as compared with personal identity, and we illustrate how leaders can redirect and manage the forces of social identity that can divide groups to promote positive relations and to expand the resources available for group functioning and activity.

Group Membership: Social Categorization and Social Identity

Group membership is critical to one’s self-esteem, sense of psychological security, and physical well-being. In this section, we consider two fundamental processes involved in the collective experience: social categorization and in-group identity.

Social categorization: Categorization is an essential basis for human perception, cognition, and functioning. Categorization is the process by which individuals quickly and effectively sort the many different objects, events, and people they encounter into a smaller number of meaningful units. In this respect, people can be characterized as cognitive misers who compromise total accuracy for efficiency when confronted with the often overwhelming complexity of their social world.¹

When people are categorized into groups (i.e., social categorization), something that often occurs spontaneously on the basis of physical similarity, proximity, or shared fate, differences between members of the same category tend to be perceptually minimized, whereas differences between groups tend to be exaggerated and overgeneralized.² For example, when people meet someone who would normally be considered a distant acquaintance while traveling abroad, they spontaneously feel more close, connected, and similar to the person because of the salience of their common group membership in that context.

Moreover, in the process of categorizing people into groups, people classify themselves into one of the social categories (and out of the others). The distinction between in-group and out-group members as a consequence of social categorization has a profound influence on affect, cognition, and behavior.³ People spontaneously experience more positive emotion toward other members of the in-group than toward members of the out-group and think about in-group and out-group members in fundamentally different (i.e., biased) ways. Positive behaviors of in-group members are seen as further evidence of in-group virtues, whereas negative actions by in-group members are typically discounted and often overlooked.

In terms of social relations and behavioral outcomes, people are more sensitive to the needs of in-group than of out-group members, more helpful toward in-group than toward out-group members, more trusting of in-group members, more likely to work harder to benefit the in-group, and more likely to be cooperative and exercise more personal restraint when using endangered common resources when these are shared with in-group members than with others.⁴

Social identity: The essentially automatic process of distinguishing the group containing the self (the in-group) from other groups (the out-groups) represents a foundational principle in some of the most prominent contemporary theories of intergroup behavior, such as social identity theory and self-categorization theory.⁵

These perspectives posit that a person defines the self along a dimension from personal identity, as a unique individual with distinct characteristics and personal motives, to collective identity, as the embodiment of a social collective that reflects shared characteristics and goals. At the individual level, one’s personal welfare and goals are most salient and important. When personal identity is more salient, an individual’s needs, standards, beliefs, and motives better predict behavior. In contrast, when social identity is more strongly activated, “people come to perceive themselves more as interchangeable exemplars of a social category than as unique personalities defined by their individual differences from others.”⁶ Under these conditions, collective needs, goals, and standards are primary.

People who more closely identify with their group adhere more strongly to intragroup norms. Thus, whether personal or collective identity is more salient critically shapes how a person perceives, interprets, evaluates, and responds to situations and to others.

Not only do psychological biases produce perceptions of competition and motivate actual competition between groups, but also competition between groups itself acts to increase bias and distrust. When people perceive out-group members as a threat, they tend to derogate them and discriminate against them more directly. Thus, psychological biases and actual competition often reinforce each other to escalate intergroup tension and conflict.

Taken together, these findings paint a bleak picture for intergroup relations. However, helping leaders understand the factors that contribute to intergroup bias and the underlying principles that shape intergroup relations can help leaders develop effective strategies for improving intergroup relations.

Improving Intergroup Relations: The Common In-Group Identity Model

Because identification with social groups is a basic process that is fundamental to intergroup bias, social psychologists have targeted this process as a starting point for improving intergroup relations. The approach we have employed, the common in-group identity model, builds on the foundation of research on social identity.⁷

This strategy emphasizes the process of recategorization, whereby members of different groups are induced to conceive of themselves as a single, more inclusive superordinate group rather than as separate groups. With recategorization, as proposed by the common in-group identity model, the goal is to reorganize the perception of intergroup boundaries, redefining who is conceived of as an in-group member, to reduce bias.⁸ If members of different groups are induced to conceive of themselves as a single more inclusive, superordinate group, then attitudes toward former out-group members can become more positive through processes involving pro-in-group bias, thereby reducing intergroup bias.

Leaders can achieve or reinforce a common in-group identity by increasing the salience of existing common superordinate memberships (e.g., a school, a company, a nation) in two ways: by contrasting the in-group with relevant out-groups or by emphasizing the shared fate of group members. Leaders can also create new common connections and identity by introducing opportunities for active cooperation among members within a group or framing intergroup relations as competitive. Even relatively minor interventions—such as increasing the physical similarity among group members using clothing or visible insignias, bringing members into closer physical proximity, or creating positive affect (e.g., with an unexpected gift)—facilitate the development of common identity.

The value of creating a one-group representation for reducing intergroup bias has been consistently supported by research over the past twenty years.⁹ Laboratory studies have demonstrated that diverse interventions that produce more-inclusive representations of different groups, such as such as fostering cooperation, enhancing perceptual similarity, and inducing positive affect, systematically reduce intergroup bias. These results have been replicated in field settings involving high schools, banking mergers, and blended families with children and in different cultures.

Moreover, emphasizing group boundaries, thereby increasing the sense of “we-ness,” often strengthens the position of leaders, who are subsequently seen as more prototypical and thus representative of the group.¹⁰ Leaders who more closely reflect the prototypical characteristics of the group receive more popular support, are seen as more charismatic, and are more influential. Thus leaders have a broad range of techniques for reinforcing or altering the inclusiveness of group boundaries.

Despite the evidence for the benefits of a common group identity on group functioning and relationships, it is critical to recognize that people have multiple group memberships and identities. These can be seen as compatible or incompatible with a common group identity and thus strengthen or undermine the stability of the group boundary.

Challenges of a Superordinate Identity: Multiple Categorizations and Identities

One implication of people’s multiple group memberships is that beyond a laboratory setting it is often difficult to sustain a superordinate group identity in the face of powerful social forces that emphasize different group identities. Thus, when social identities are culturally important, such as race or ethnicity, the impact of interventions that temporarily induce feelings of common identity may quickly fade as the original, different category membership becomes reactivated through everyday experiences.

Moreover, when group identities and their associated cultural values are vital to one’s functioning, then demands to abandon these group identities or to adopt a color-blind ideology are likely to arouse tension and conflict. In particular, social identity theory proposes that when the integrity of group identity is threatened, people are motivated to reaffirm their distinc...

Table of contents

• Also by
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction - Intergroup Leadership
• part I - Insights and Concepts
• part II - Tools and Pathways
• part III - Cases in Context
• Index
• About the Contributors