Organizational Faultlines: Social Identity Dynamics and Organizational Change

Abstract

The role that social identity dynamics play during organizational change is explored in a grounded theory study of a rural hospital undergoing major change. The faultline concept, from small group research, is applied at the organizational level to explain how professional identity group dynamics act as a barrier to change. The main contribution is the authors' organizational faultline model, which shows how non-explicit social identities (i.e. small town membership), when triggered by organizational change, can result in poor intergroup dynamics and decreased job satisfaction. This study contributes to our understanding of social identities and organizational change by illustrating how organizational change may have activated latent social identity faultlines.

Keywords:

• Professional identities
• organizational change
• faultlines
• intergroup dynamics

Notes

Abduction is a type of reasoning that combines inductive and deductive techniques. Abduction ‘begins by examining data and after scrutiny of these data, entertains all possible explanations for the observed data, and then forms hypotheses to confirm or disconfirm until the researcher arrives at the most plausible interpretation of the observed data’ (Charmaz, 2006, p. 186).

Memo-ing is a process wherein the researcher writes informal analytic notes, which allow them to stop and analyse their ideas about the codes and emerging categories. Memo-ing is important because it encourages researchers to analyse data and develop codes into categories early in the research process (Charmaz, 2006).

In Canada, registered nurses (RN) and registered practical nurses (RPNs) differ in terms of education (RNs must have a university degree while RPNs require a college diploma), duties (the RN has more responsibility than the RPN and is trained to deal with more complex situations) and salaries (RNs earn higher salaries than RPNs). These differences are summarized on the website of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario: http://www.rnao.org/Page.asp?PageID=924&ContentID=1288.

The survey initially referred to on page 3 that had been conducted by an independent third party group prior to the researchers involvement with the organization.