PMGM7001 Chap.5 Social Identity and Leading a Diverse Team
Social Identity and Leading a Diverse Team
Why groups matter
Teams have become the basic building block of organisations, and the lecture explains why people want to belong to them with social identity theory. Groups give a sense of belonging and are a source of pride and self-esteem. People choose groups for similarity, distinctiveness, status and uncertainty reduction.
What belonging costs
The same process divides the world into us and them.
Once people identify with a group they compare it with others, exaggerate differences between groups and similarities within them, favour their own members, and, when they belong to a devalued group, may suffer social identity threat that lowers confidence and performance.
All of this can happen inside a single diverse team.
What makes diverse teams work
The lecture cites research finding that the most effective teams share contribution evenly and are attentive to each other's mental states, and research showing that cultural diversity can hinder creativity unless someone acts as a cultural broker between members.
It adds rules for building teams: a clear mission, the right level of coordination, a team design and process, and a structure for roles, information and activities.
The Ryder Cup case
The assigned case follows the captain of the European team at the 2014 Ryder Cup, twelve individualist golfers from many countries facing a single-nation opponent.
He kept players comfortable as individuals, asked them to take pride in their country, town and family as well as Europe, gave the European identity meaning through symbols, defined the golf course as the real opponent, used data to pair players, and delegated in layers to caddies and five vice-captains. Europe won comfortably.
The lecture asks you to group his practices, explain them with theory, and judge how far they transfer.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Teams as the building block of organisations
- 02
Four reasons people choose groups
- 03
Stereotyping, ingroup favouritism and identity threat
- 04
Three features of the most effective teams
- 05
Cultural brokerage and creative teams
- 06
Rules for building and managing teams
- 07
Nested identities in the Ryder Cup case
- 08
Job, people and context as lenses
Worked example · free
Diagnose a fractured global team
- 3Explain the cliques with social identity theory.
- 3Propose a shared identity that adds rather than replaces.
- 3Add a structural change and a broker role.
Key terms
- Social Identity
- The part of a person's sense of self that comes from belonging to groups, which provides pride and self-esteem.
- Ingroup Favouritism
- Seeing members of one's own group as better than others while treating people outside it as all the same.
- Social Identity Threat
- The drop in confidence and performance that occurs when people expect to be judged negatively because of their link to a devalued group.
- Cultural Brokerage
- Facilitating interaction across people from different cultural backgrounds, which the research links to more creative diverse teams.
- Nested Identity
- Holding several group identities at once, such as family, town, country and team, so that a shared identity sits alongside existing ones.
Social Identity and Leading a Diverse Team FAQ
Why did the captain not try to make the golfers a close-knit team?
Because golf trains players to focus on their own game, and he judged that forcing togetherness would fit poorly with how they normally think. He kept them comfortable as individuals and gave them a shared identity through symbols, a common task and pride in each other's backgrounds instead.
Can diversity make a team less creative?
Yes. The research the lecture cites found that conflicting norms and assumptions can inhibit a culturally diverse team's creativity. What made the difference was a cultural broker, a member with multicultural experience who helped others interact across backgrounds.
Was the Ryder Cup win proof that the captain's methods worked?
Not on its own. The team was favoured and playing at home, and the captain had been on winning sides before. The case supports the methods as plausible contributors, and a critical answer weighs them against those other explanations.
Assessment move
List every practice the captain used on a separate line, then group them into no more than four categories and name the theory behind each category. The lecture explicitly asks whether many practices can be grouped, and a grouped list is the backbone of paper topic two.
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