Page 111 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

81
4. GROUP-LEVEL EXPLANATIONS
into "us" and "them." This simplistic dichotomy can lead to both subtle
and overt bias and discrimination as well as intergroup conflict that can
interfere with an organization's ability to establish a productive climate
where individuals can focus on the work at hand. Despite the natural in­
clination to notice differences and to order our worlds according to these
distinctions, the distinctions themselves are artificial. In no way are we born
knowing that race and gender matter and that one's identity in reference to
these designations affords one status and privilege. Our understanding of
the meaning of being White or of being female, in and outside of organiza­
tions, is socially constructed and passed down in organizations through its
history, its human resource system, its leadership, and its culture. There­
fore, in order for organizations to avoid group-based discrimination and
its high financial and productivity costs, companies must construct new
identities for its members, or at a minimum, find ways to allow multiple
identities to constructively coexist.

Developing New Organizationally Relevant Identities

The intergroup approach to prejudice reduction identifies three alterna­
tives for eliminating group based bias: decategorization, recategorization,
and subcategorization (Brewer & Miller, 1996). Decategorization involves
personalizing interactions between members of different groups; helping
employees see one another as individuals rather than simply members of
groups. The focus is to minimize social identity while maximizing per­
sonal identity (Sampson, 1999). For example, one decategorization strat­
egy would be to avoid assigning workgroups or teams based upon de­
mographic group membership. Recategorization tolerates the existence of
multiple social identities but also encourages individuals to develop a su­
perordinate identity that is motivated by having a superordinate goal. The
"us" versus "them" that is so prevalent as a result of our natural inclina­
tion to attend to social identities is replaced with a "we" identity when
an important and common goal is introduced. This was demonstrated
in the Sherif camp study mentioned previously in which feuding camps
were forced to "come together" to solve a common problem. The common
superordinate goal allows individuals to recategorize their memberships
and identities so that they belong to a single inclusive group (Sampson,
1999).
Although social identities can be an impetus for prejudice, as men­
tioned earlier, the social groups to which we belong often provide us
with a sense of self worth or at a minimum a sense of identity. Both
decategorization and recategorization downplay that aspect of one's self
that may be quite important, and which in an increasingly diverse soci­
ety, many people may not want to deny (Cox, 1994; Sampson, 1999). In