CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

392 TERRY AND AMIOT
high-status employees. Among these employees, there was evidence of
in-group bias on the status-relevant dimensions and bias in favor of the
out-group on the status-irrelevant dimensions.
As expected, employees from the low-status organization appraised
the merger as more threatening than the employees of the high-status
organization. Moreover, there was evidence, in line with predictions, of
a positive relationship between appraised stress and intergroup differentiation
on the status-irrelevant dimensions among the employees of the
low-status organization, but not for the high-status employees. Thus, the
more the employees of the low-status organization were threatened by
the merger, the more likely they were to engage in in-group bias on the
status-irrelevant dimensions. Contrary to expectations, the status-by-threat
interactions were nonsignificant in the prediction of differentiation on the
status-relevant dimensions.
The fact that low-status group members displayed more evidence of both
threat and in-group bias could be due to the heightened salience of their
relatively inferior status in the context of the merger. In such a context, they
may have been particularly motivated to differentiate themselves positively
from the employees of the other organization. This pattern of results accords
with the social identity perspective, as does the finding that organizational
status interacted with type of dimension on which the two organizations
were rated. For the high-status employees, there was a tendency to rate the
in-group as better than the out-group on the status-relevant dimensions,
whereas the low-status employees engaged in in-group bias on the statusirrelevant
dimensions. These results presumably reflected the motivation
of the employees of the high-status organization to affirm their position
of relative superiority in the new organization. In contrast, the low-status
employees—presumably motivated by a desire to attain positive social
identity—exhibited in-group bias on the dimensions not centrally relevant
to the basis for the status differences among hospitals.
status, leGitiMaCy, anD eMPloyee resPonses to a MerGer
From an SIT point of view, mergers are fundamentally unstable intergroup
situations. Mergers (a) create instability in the intergroup structure
as they involve the recategorization of different organizational groups
into one superordinate entity, (b) weaken the boundaries between the premerger
organizations, and, at least to a certain extent, (c) increase the permeability
between these previously distinct premerger organizations. In
addition to considering the role of group status on in-group bias, subjective
beliefs concerning the intergroup context are, according to SIT, critical
to an understanding of intergroup relations. According to Tajfel (1974,
1975), the extent to which group members perceive their status position to
be legitimately attained is an important sociostructural belief that should
be an important determinant of group members’ identity–management