Identity Management in the Organizational Learning Process
The implication of the above discussion is that the effective management of organizational knowledge acquisition, conversion, and creation speaks for policies that are sensitive to social identities and that can reconcile them with new organizational needs. There appear to be two key requirements for such policies to work. The first is to establish constructive relationships between the various participating groups based on trust and the preservation of what Edmondson (1999b) calls ‘psychological safety’ for the persons involved—in other words assuaging their fears of failure and personal harm. The second is a search for acceptable over-arching goals that integrate the participants’ efforts and provide a sense of direction for the learning process. These points may be illustrated by examples from organizational learning processes, involving groups with respectively diverse occupational and national identities.
The use of teams as organizational learning vehicles that constructively reconcile identity differences is apparent in the examples below. Senge (1993) observes that ‘teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations’ (1993: 10). Marshall (2001) sees project teams, comprising members from several contributing social groups, as exemplary of the tension between seeking a team identity (homogeneity) and preserving member differences (heterogeneity). Heterogeneity reflects the different yet complementary competencies and knowledge sets required to feed a constructive learning process. Homogeneity is required to unify diverse individuals and groups around a shared goal-directed activity. The managerial challenge is to resolve this tension in a manner that is conducive to organizational learning.
Learning and occupational identities
De Haen, Tsui-Auch, and Alexis (2001) offer the example of pharmaceutical companies that had to learn how to implement new regulations on Good Laboratory Practice (GLP). The first individuals in a pharmaceutical company to become familiar with GLP regulations were typically people with responsibility for preclinical drug safety assessment and regulatory compliance. However, compliance with GLP regulations required the cooperation of people from different specialties. Research protocols had to be endorsed by several investigators such as a pharmacotoxologist, veterinarian, statistician, manager, and a representative of a quality assurance unit. This degree of collective compliance threatened the identity of specialists who had previously conceived of themselves as individual researchers, especially as activities falling under GLP regulations became formalized into hierarchical systems of standard operating procedures (SOPs). The change was uncomfortable for researchers, for whom it sometimes lacked a scientific rationale and who had been trained to conduct experiments with a degree of operational flexibility that fosters chance discovery.
Companies learned to become creative in fostering their employees’ compliance with GLP regulations in ways that were consistent with the social identities of such personnel. For example, they encouraged research staff to take an expert role in the writing of SOPs, and attached acceptable symbols and incentives to the change in ways that met the need for peer recognition. They also endeavored to motivate acceptance among researchers by encouraging peer pressure within teams. De Haen et al. comment that: ‘The learning unit was always a group . . . This focus on groups signifies at least implicit acknowledgement of a social component in organizational learning needed for the implementation of GLP regulations’ (De Haen et al., 2001: 915).
In ways such as these, managers in the pharmaceutical companies studied were able to effect a cultural change among scientific staff that built upon rather than violated their social identity. In fact, the application of GLP regulations eventually encouraged the emergence of new corporate-wide attitudes towards quality assurance based on the way they promote accountability and transparency in the acquisition and manipulation of laboratory data. The learning process led to staff eventually accepting the regulations as an embedded norm that became, at least in part, tacit in nature. In this respect it provided a bridge from group to organizational identity in a way that changed an important aspect of the latter.
Learning and national identities
Many international acquisitions, alliances, and collaborations are made with knowledge acquisition or synergistic learning as one of their objectives. In the case of international technology partnerships, knowledge creation is the primary objective. Yet many such arrangements fail and this is often attributed to difficulties in reconciling the partners’ different national cultures and identities. The role that can be attributed to national identity is, however, often difficult to isolate because other sources of friction may be present which also stand in the way of creating the conditions for knowledge transfer, let alone mutual learning. For example, the learning intentions of international partners can be motivated by a desire to acquire the other’s proprietary knowledge for competitive reasons, or in the case of an acquisition to subsequently close down the unit supplying the knowledge. Differences in the partners’ abilities to learn from each other can rapidly undermine trust between them and engender a defensive attitude towards sharing knowledge (Hamel, 1991). Differences in the partners’ organizational cultures and modes of working can also inhibit the evolution of effective learning relationships between them, due to factors other than nationality such as substantial differences in their size (Doz, 1996).
Heavens and Child (1999) examined the experience of six international project teams created to achieve specific knowledge-generating objectives. The cases pointed to problems caused by differences in national identity, and how the management of learning teams could reduce the gap created by these differences in the process of developing a new shared identity. The role of personal trust emerged as a vital facilitating factor for this process to take place, especially in terms of key relationships between individual team members. Trust informed the dynamics of team generated knowledge and its transformation into organizational learning. It also helped the team members to transcend the factors defining their separate social identities, and that otherwise threatened to jeopardize the collective learning process. As closer relationships developed between team members, they gradually became more comfortable in sharing their views and knowledge and they became more aware of a common learning goal.
These observations can be illustrated by one of the cases, a water company. The scenario for cross-national team learning in this case developed through a series of takeovers. These were prompted by a desire on the part of the British company to expand in a certain business area, with the initial acquisition of a Swedish firm in possession of the required technology. Subsequently, this latter firm bought out a smaller, Norwegian company, whose patents therefore went to the British water company as overall owner. It was the work with this smaller company on new waste water processes that was studied, one of a number of collaborative projects with the Scandinavians.
Issues of group identity impacted on the work of the project team, especially in the initial stages. The company’s head of technology innovation, who had been with the British company for twenty years, noted that team work with the Swedes and Norwegians, based on technology developed by the latter, took a long time to evolve. His mission was to establish the ground rules and research program, but he was hindered by the fact that the Norwegian company was reluctant to tell him anything. There were two main reasons for this: first, the company, being small and therefore vulnerable, feared being ‘emptied out,’ with their patents being taken and sold on; second, and more generally, the Norwegians have a dislike of the English on account of contentious issues relating to their occupational identity as water engineers such as acid rain, and pollution from UK coastal outlets. It was only through withholding knowledge and distorting channels of information that the Norwegian subsidiary felt it could preserve its worth, and therefore its identity and security. A lack of trust held the Norwegians back from contributing to learning by the wider organization. It is significant that the initial formal framework of procedures and programs devised for mutual working, and intended also to promote mutual confidence, was insufficient to facilitate the learning process.
Barriers to knowledge sharing were becoming apparent about one year into the project. The initial barriers, created by fear and mistrust on the part of the Norwegian subsidiary, were overcome primarily through the personal relationship developed by the new project manager with his counterpart in Scandinavia. This relationship opened up communication between the British and Norwegian groups and enabled them to recognize mutual benefits and objectives. A joint research and development program also served importantly to assuage the Norwegians’ fears and to provide a bridge across the national divide based on a sharing of their common scientific identities. This illustrates the importance of perceived goal congruence, a reconciliation of social identities, and a sense of psychological safety as conditions for team members to share knowledge and so generate organizational learning. The joint research and development program enabled findings from the project to be applied throughout the British and Scandinavian companies. Informants agreed that both operational processes, concerning the day to day running of waste water treatment works, and process knowledge—the actual technological processes of waste water treatment—were considerably enhanced through the teamwork that was developed. The program was also a symbolic indication of the new organizational identity that was being forged within the international corporate group.
National identities can clearly create sensitivities for learning within international partnerships, networks, and MNCs. National identity can manifest itself in ideas of national superiority both through categorizing other partners’ attitudes as negative and through conceiving of learning as a one-way process. This is particularly common among the managers of MNCs, which are more likely to transfer practices within ISAs unilaterally than other firms. Child and Rodrigues report examples of this unilateralism and conclude that the definition of one partner as superior may, at worst, ‘lead to a situation in which exchanges are unbalanced, information is concealed and people are excluded from opportunities to learn’ (1996: 53). Even if there is a strong intention by the partners to learn from the strengths of each other’s practices, their staff may consider the other’s practices to be inappropriate or even illegitimate.
Salk conducted three detailed case studies of multi-management teams in IJVs that throw further light on the role of social identity as a referent for inter-personal attitudes and behavior (Salk, 1996; Salk and Brannen, 2000; Salk and Shenkar, 2001). While not focused explicitly on team learning, Salk’s studies elucidate the problems that social identity can create for attaining the shared meanings and behaviors necessary for teams to succeed in achieving integrated knowledge conversion and creation. She found that although the three teams ultimately developed differently, in their first weeks and months they each passed through a similar phase of development which she terms the ‘encounter phase.’ During this phase, distinct social identities, primarily based on the members’ nationalities, coexisted and sometimes competed with one another over how the team would work and the IJV would function. Cultural stereotyping and the creation of in-groups and out-groups characterized all three teams; this resulted from an enactment of social identity. In one of the IJVs, the dominant enactment of nationality-based identities within the teams persisted for several years. Salk argues that this persistence was partly explicable in terms of reinforcing factors such as a heavy resource dependence on its two parent companies, staffing the IJV’s management through secondment from the parents, and the threat of market downturn. However, she also draws attention to the way that in this case the nationality-based social identities, once established, became ‘a lens mediating the impact of contextual change on the enactments of the IJV setting and functioning by its members.’ (Salk and Shenkar, 2001: 173).
The research we have reviewed points to the importance of attending carefully to the encounter phase in new teams composed of people who have different social identities. People coming together to work on a project create a discursive community which, on the one hand, enables them to compare their different perspectives and knowledge but, on the other hand, can give them a sense of being isolated, non-communicating, and even in conflict with others (Gherardi, 2005). Management’s aim must be to encourage them to reach as quickly as possible an accommodation that constructively combines their different frames of meaning and behavioral assumptions. It is important for this reason to minimize personal concerns and threats that can induce team members to retreat into the psychological refuge of their separate social identities as an excuse for defensive stereotyping of other members and/or of management.
In the specific context of teams established to generate organizational learning, assurances may have to be offered that a sharing of tacit knowledge will not be to the detriment of personal careers and employment, efforts made to surface and then constructively overcome social stereotypes, and care taken to offer the team a clear objective for their work which they can understand and accept. Mixed identity teams can offer a rich combination of expertise, experience, and perspective to the learning process, but for this potential to be realized conditions of trust must prevail both within the team and in its relationship to management. If such teams are intended to have a continuing and evolving life, encouragement must be given to evolving trust to a point where the dominant social identity becomes one shared by the participants themselves (Child, 2001).