CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

13. SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION IN INTERGROUP MERGERS 393
strategies. Specifically, high-status group members who perceive their
current status position to be legitimate—that is, as a deserved outcome of
a just procedure—are likely to react to the threat of a merger more negatively
than those who view their status position as less legitimate. Dominant
group members who feel that their status position is legitimate are
likely to react more negatively to the possibility that the intergroup status
relations may change as a consequence of the merger. This is presumably
because they believe their superior status position to be deserved and that
they are motivated to maintain the status distinctions between the groups
(see Tajfel & Turner, 1979).
In contrast, low-status group members who perceive their status position
to be a legitimate outcome of a just procedure are likely to be more accepting
of a merger situation than those who perceive that it is an illegitimate
reflection of the group’s relative standing. The perception that their lowstatus
position is legitimate is undesirable, and hence employees who feel
this way are likely to react more positively to the merger because of the possibility
that the situation may facilitate individual mobility attempts. The
instability brought about by the merger is thus likely to be welcomed by
these low-status group members, who are motivated to deal with their inferior
status and opened to the possibilities of social mobility. On the other
hand, the perception of an illegitimately low status position may engender
the behavior and responses that are more typically observed in members
of high-status groups. In other words, an illegitimately low group status is
likely to give rise to mutual solidarity (e.g., strong in-group identification)
and hence a negative reaction to the threat of an organizational merger.
Research has shown that members of groups perceiving an illegitimately
low status position do display behavior that is usually observed among
high-status group members, such as relatively strong in-group identification
and in-group-favoring discrimination in reward allocation (Ellemers
et al., 1993, Turner & Brown, 1978). There is also evidence that low-status
group members are more likely to engage in collective status improvement
when the situation is perceived to be illegitimate, whereas individual action
(e.g., social mobility) is more likely when the status differential is perceived
to be legitimate. Thus, there is some support for the proposal that low-status
group members who perceive their status position to be a legitimate
outcome of a just procedure are likely to be more accepting of a merger
situation than those who perceive that it is an illegitimate reflection of the
group’s relative standing. In contrast, little empirical attention has focused
on the effects of perceptions of legitimacy on the intergroup behavior and
responses of members of high-status groups; however, Turner and Brown
(1978) did find that members of high-status groups were most biased toward
low-status groups when the status hierarchy was perceived to be unstable
(which is relevant to an organizational merger) but legitimate.
To examine the interplay between relative group status and judgments
about the legitimacy of the group’s status position in the unstable context
of an organizational merger, a study of the merger between two previ-