CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

13. SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION IN INTERGROUP MERGERS 403
high-group members experience an organizational merger and realize
the implications this change has for them as members of a specific premerger
organization.
In fact, for members of the low-status group, the unstable context of
the merger can be initially perceived as offering a certain amount of permeability
and the opportunity to join a higher status group. These perceptions
of permeability and social mobility might have been especially
operative at the beginning of the merger, when members of the low-status
group were eager to see the opportunities offered through the merger
and that opportunities for “passing” were still salient. These propositions
are also in line with the five-stage model of intergroup relations,
which proposed that members of the low-status group should prioritize
the use of social mobility (over collective strategies) as a means to
improve their statuses, especially if intergroup boundaries are perceived
to be permeable (Taylor & McKirnan, 1984). However, with time, members
of the low-status group showed a decrease in their adjustment to the
merger. Because the present merger was characterized by assimilation
of the low-status group into the high-status group (Mottola et al., 1997),
and because at Time 2, members of the low-status group came to perceive
that it was difficult to have access to new opportunities, low-status
group members may have come to realize, with time, that the occasions
for passing and for improving their positions within the new intergroup
structure were deceiving, and that the new, merged organization was in
fact more representative of the higher status group. These characteristics
and implications of the merger, which became clearer and more established
over time, could explain why low-status group members’ adjustment
decreased throughout the merger.
Conversely, and as expected, members of the high-status group reported
an increase in their adjustment to the merger over time. Whereas members
of the high-status group started off the merging process by being relatively
defensive, their adjustment improved throughout the merger. This pattern
of findings could be explained by the fact that for members of the highstatus
group, the merger carried the threat of having their social identity
“dragged down” by associating with a lower status group (Hornsey et al.,
2003). This identity maintenance motive could have been especially prominent
at the beginning of the merger, as the instability, novelty, and uncertainty
of the merger was salient and likely to threaten the status quo (Seo
& Hill, 2005), and when members of the high-status group did not yet have
the opportunity to assert their superiority in the new intergroup structure.
Yet, as the merger proceeded, and because the high-status group did
come to have opportunities to assert their advantageous position within
the new, merged group (i.e., the merger was characterized by assimilation
and by the perpetuation of the original status differentials), these negative
responses and feelings of threat decreased. These findings differed somewhat
from the Terry and Callan (1998) and Terry and O’Brien (2001) studies,
which found main effects for premerger status (e.g., higher threat and