Page 94 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

THOMAS AND CHROBOT-MASON
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WHY GROUP MEMBERSHIP MATTERS
Organizations select employees based upon applicants' knowledge, skill,
and ability, so why should your group identity, such as your race, gender,
or your sexuality impact how you are treated by your peers or your leaders
at work? There are a variety of ways in which to explain why such arbi­
trary characteristics and differences seem to matter in organizations. Both
social identity theory and social categorization theory illustrate how group
membership differences can create opportunities for discrimination. Social
marking explanations of group-based discrimination in organizations aid
in conveying the importance of social power in the determination of which
differences matter and the consequences of those differences for the dom­
inant group's identities and self worth. Social marking also explains how
mere differences can serve as a justification for mistreatment and discrim­
ination. Finally, we examine the relevance of privilege to discussions of
group-based discrimination in organizations and how privilege and social
dominance helps to further illustrate social identity, social categorization,
and social marking explanations of group-based discrimination.
Social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) suggests that as individuals
we are motivated to feel positively about ourselves. To acquire a positive
sense of self, we view other people as either members of our ingroup
or outgroup, and we compare ourselves favorably relative to outgroup
members. Members of our ingroup are those with whom we presume to
share common characteristics. Despite our sense of kinship with ingroup
members, we also appreciate the diversity within our ingroup (the ingroup
differentiation effect). That is, a female executive may identify other women
in her organization as part of her ingroup, yet still appreciate that these
women differ in regard to their talents, racial background, and age.
In contrast, members of our outgroups are those with whom we presume
we share little in common. We also lack an appreciation of our outgroups'
diversity (the outgroup homogeneity effect). If we refer back to the female
executive, she may identify men, as members of the outgroup, as all being
the same, and therefore she may not be able to as easily appreciate the
significance of their differences in regards to their talents, race, and age.
It is not at all uncommon for race, gender, and even sexuality to be
used as determinants of who is (or is not) a member of our ingroup. Tajfel
(1982) argued that the need to divide the world into ingroups and out­
groups is a cognitive process that enables the mind to simplify an increas­
ingly complex world. Certainly diversity is part of that complexity. Numer­
ous studies using the "minimal group paradigm," (a technique in which
researchers divide their participant sample into subgroups based upon
an arbitrary criteria), demonstrate that the mere division of a group by