Anzel, Andrew (2022) Regulating organizational identity in temporary organizations. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Organizational identity refers to the central, distinct, and enduring features that define ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’ as an organization. Extant scholarship posits that organizations use historical referents and projected futures to construct identity in the present; however, it is not yet known how organizational identity is formed when organizations are project-based or otherwise temporary in nature. This thesis addresses this research gap by exploring how a temporary arts organization formed aligned identity understandings without an internal past or anticipated future.

This thesis is grounded in a three-year, qualitative study of the ‘City of Culture Trust’ (CCT) a temporary arts organization. Data consists of 103 interviews and178 hours of observation.
Data is presented that shows how managers constructed formal identity claims through which they hoped to shape the identity understandings of organizational members. Justified though the expediency required by temporary organizations, managers also established a system of sensechecking – a process induced within this research – through which managers evaluated whether organizational members developed identity understandings congruent with manager-derived identity claims. By rewarding aligned understandings and admonishing misalignment, organizational managers were able to quickly regulate how members viewed the organization’s identity.

However, this regulation process was not always successful. To explain why this is the case, additional research is recounted that explored how workers paid attention to different cues when they made sense of the organization’s identity. Worker sensemaking was either goal-attentive (whereby workers focused on ‘who we are’ as an organization) or operation-attentive (whereby workers focused on ‘what we do’ as an organization). Workers who engaged in both goal-attentive and operation-attentive sensemaking were able to develop identity understandings aligned with CCT managers, while workers who engaged extensively in goal-attentive sensemaking but not operation-attentive sensemaking were unable to do so.

In total, this thesis provides several contributions to the scholarship of organizational identity and sensemaking. First, this thesis posits that organizational identity can be constructed vis-à-vis regulation rather than historical positioning. A theoretical model for organizational identity regulation in temporary organizations is put forward. Moreover, while previous literature has characterized the emergence of organizational identity as collaborative and organic, this regulation model complicates this core conception. Second, while extant literature posits that individuals extract and interpret cues from their environment to ‘make sense’ of ambiguous stimuli, this thesis expands this conceptualization to define two specific types of sensemaking attention relevant to interpreting organizational identity: goal-attentive and operation-attentive. Moreover, sense-shaping efforts related to organizational identity must address both types of sensemaking in order to ensure that workers develop aligned identity understandings.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Corporate image, Corporate culture, Business enterprises, Supervision of employees, Organizational behavior, Organizational effectiveness
Official Date:	September 2022
Dates:	Date Event September 2022 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Warwick Business School
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Beer, Haley ; Currie, Graeme
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	ix, 186 pages : illustrations
Language:	eng

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