CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

13. SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION IN INTERGROUP MERGERS 401
First, participants agreed on the respective status position of their premerger
organization, such that employees in the premerger, high-status
(international carrier) organization rated their own premerger organization
as being relatively higher in status than employees from the lower
status premerger organization (domestic airline). In line with predictions,
the employees of the low-status premerger organization reported poorer
adjustment to the merger in comparison with high-status group members.
In fact, in comparison with high-status group members, low-status group
members reported lower perceptions of fairness at the very beginning
of the merger (i.e., Time 1). This finding is in line with SIT, according to
which members of the low-status group can become particularly aware of
the injustice and the illegitimacy of their disadvantaged position within
the intergroup structure when they perceive some alternatives to this situation
and that their position can be improved (Tajfel & Turner, 1986; see
also Platow, Wenzel, & Nolan, 2003). This might have been particularly
the case at the beginning of the merger, when members of the low-status
group appeared more optimistic about the opportunities offered by the
merger and the intergroup structure was unstable.
Then, once the merger was implemented (e.g., two years after the beginning
of the merging process), members of the low-status group reported
lower identification with both the new, merged organization and with
their premerger organization, as well as more in-group bias in comparison
with members of the high-status group. The findings regarding in-group
bias corroborated those from the Terry and Callan (1998) study, in revealing
more overall in-group bias among members of the low-status group,
and also concurred with theoretical propositions made by SIT, according
to which group differentiation is most marked when the social categories
are particularly salient or personally relevant to group members (Tajfel,
1974). In the context of the present study, where, at Time 2, possibilities for
improvement and access to new opportunities were somewhat deceiving,
manifesting more in-group bias might have represented one social competition
strategy used by low-status group members to achieve a more
positive and distinct social identity. The findings concerning the identification
measures are in accord with SIT in that they show that an inferior
group membership—a comparison that is likely to be heightened in a
merger situation—has a negative impact on a person’s social identity (e.g.,
Brown et al., 1986; Ellemers et al., 1993; Sachdev & Bourhis, 1987, 1991).
These findings also replicated those obtained in Terry and O’Brien (2001),
which revealed lower identification with the new, merged organization
among members of the low-status group.
Despite these main effects of premerger organization status, and as
expected, low- versus high-status group members’ adjustment to the
merger (on the measures of threat and job satisfaction) followed different
patterns from the very beginning of the merger up to two years later.
As can be seen in Figure 13.3 and Figure 13.4, members of the low-status
group reported a lower level of adjustment to the merger over time (in