Event Details

"My Company is Friendly,” “Mine’s a Rebel”: Anthropomorphism and Shifting Organizational Identity from “What” to “Who”

Why do we not blink when our organizations are described as friendly or aggressive? Why do we expect our organizations to care about our well-being? We argue that anthropomorphism – an attribution of human qualities or behavior to nonhuman entities, objects, and events – is both pervasive and surprisingly important in organizational life. Anthropomorphism helps satisfy the motives for sensemaking and social connection, even if the veracity of the results is in the eye of the beholder. Though anthropomorphism has broad relevance to various domains, we primarily focus on organizational identity. We contend that anthropomorphism enables organizational members to conceive of their organization in terms of “who it is/who we are as an organization” (e.g., personality, attitudes, affect) rather than “what it is/what we are” (e.g., industry, structure, age). This shift results in a more visceral, memorable, and energizing organizational identity, with major implications. We discuss how anthropomorphism results from both top-down (i.e., “This is who we are”) and bottom-up (i.e., “You appear human to me”) dynamics. We also discuss how treating an organization as if it were a person primes “interpersonal” emotions, behaviors, and accountability, facilitates social, relational, and personal identification with the organization, and enables psychological contracts.

Brief bio:

Blake Ashforth is the Horace Steele Arizona Heritage Chair in the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His research concerns the ongoing dance between individuals and organizations, including identity and identification, socialization and newcomer work adjustment, and the links among individual-, group-, and organization-level phenomena. Recent work has focused on dirty work, ambivalence, and respect. Blake is a fellow of the Academy of Management. Professor Ashforth has served as an associate editor for the Academy of Management Review and Organization Science. He recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. This talk is sponsored by the Centre for Leadership Studies and Practice and by the Department of Leadership and Management.