An Identity-Based View of Political Ideology in Modern Organizations
Location:
Ph.D. Candidate Thomas Fewer of the Management Department will be defending his Dissertation Proposal titled, “An Identity-Based View of Political Ideology in Modern Organizations” on 02/12/2021.
The time and location of his proposal defense is 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM, ZOOM.
Many thanks to the dissertation committee: • Committee Chair: Dali Ma – Associate Professor – Drexel University • Committee Member: VK Narayanan – Professor – Drexel University • Committee Member: Daan van Knippenberg – Professor – Drexel University • Committee Member: Murat Tarakci – Professor – Erasmus University • Committee Member: Forrest Briscoe – Professor – Pennsylvania State University
Abstract: Academics and private research companies alike have identified an alarming trend of increasing political partisanship among the American public. As partisan beliefs and affiliations strengthen, individuals have demonstrated strong preferences for those who hold congruent political ideologies and biases, stereotypes, and hostility towards those with competing ideologies. This strong in-group preference has led individuals to limit their exposure to those holding opposing political beliefs in their daily lives. However, as one of the few remaining social settings in which a diverse assemblage of individuals from different social groups interact, organizations have become a central setting in which inter-partisan interactions occur. In this dissertation, I build from social identity theory and suggest that political ideologies will motivate social categorization within organizations, influencing important organizational outcomes. In doing so, I demonstrate (1) how CEO partisan biases influence their decisions, (2) how political biases are managed and resolved in collective action, and (3) how intergroup interactions influence political ideology. In addition to being among the first comprehensive inquiries into political differences in organizations, the findings of these studies have profound implications to political science, political psychology, and political sociology. This dissertation lays the foundation for future studies on the organizational implications of partisan biases. Amid an increasingly polarized world, there is growing importance of this line of inquiry.