Consequences of Perceiving Organization Members as a Unified Entity: Stronger Attraction, but Greater Blame for Member Transgressions

By D. A. Effron, Hemant Kakkar, D.C. Cable
Journal of Applied Psychology | November 2022

Citation

Effron, D. A.., Kakkar, Hemant., Cable, D.C.. Consequences of Perceiving Organization Members as a Unified Entity: Stronger Attraction, but Greater Blame for Member Transgressions Journal of Applied Psychology .

Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022

Abstract

Are Uber drivers just a collection of independent workers, or a meaningful part of Uber’s workforce? Do the owners of Holiday Inn franchises around the world seem more like a loosely knit group, or more like a cohesive whole? These questions examine perceptions of organization members’ entitativity, the extent to which individuals appear to comprise a single, unified entity. We propose that the public’s perception that an organization’s members are highly entitative can be a double-edged sword for the organization. On one hand, perceiving an organization’s members as highly entitative makes the public more attracted to the organization because people associate entitativity with competence. On the other hand, perceiving members as highly entitative leads the public to blame the organization and its leadership for an individual member’s wrongdoing, because the public infers that the organization and its leadership tacitly condoned the wrongdoing. Two experiments and a field survey, plus thee supplemental studies, support these propositions. Moving beyond academic debates about whether theories should treat an organization as a unified entity, these results demonstrate the importance of understanding how much the public does perceive an organization as a unified entity. As the changing nature of work enables loosely-knit collections of individuals to hold membership in the same organization, entitativity perceptions may become increasingly consequential.

Hemant Kakkar is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Prior to this, he served as an Assistant and Associate (untenured) Professor of Management and Organisations at the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He received his doctoral degree in Organisational Behaviour from London Business School.
His research draws on social psychology and evolutionary theories of status and influence to examine judgments and behaviours of individuals and groups within social hierarchies. He also examines individuals' tendencies to engage in both positive and negative deviant behaviours.

He was awarded the 2021 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Outstanding Dissertation Award, as well as, the Outstanding Dissertation Award 2021 by the International Association of Conflict Management. His research has also won Best Conference Paper awards from the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management (2021) and the International Association of Conflict Management (2021).

His research is published in leading academic journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Applied Psychology, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research has also been featured in several popular media outlets, such as The Washington Post, Forbes, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Times UK, and the Harvard Business Review.

At ISB, Professor Kakkar teaches the core course in Organisational Behaviour.  He has also taught Foundations of Organisational Behaviour to postgraduate students and graduate-level seminar courses at the Fuqua School of Business. In 2021, he received the Award for Excellence in Teaching for the MMS program. Before joining academia, he worked as a Technical Consultant at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., India.

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