Organizational, Subunit, and Individual Identities

Although we know much about within-level identity dynamics, it’s the between-level dynamics that offer the greatest promise for developing a systemic understanding of identity in organizations. Collective identities emerge from a process of “I think” (where the founder(s)/leaders espouse and enact their entrepreneurial vision and values)  “we think” (where members and other stakeholders experience and enact the incipient identity, fostering consensus and adding breadth and depth to the identity)  “it is” (where the identity becomes institutionalized). Collective identities in turn both enable and constrain the identities nested within them. The recursive linkages among levels of identity reflect a meld of processes that are supplementary (fleshing out an identity), complementary (fostering differentiation), and conflicted. The discussion also considers the role of identity cascades, identity drift, and compositional and compilational identity emergence.