Is my Organization “good” or “bad”? : An Examination of Ethical Organizational Anthropomorphism.

Martin, Felix and Secchi, Davide (2022) Is my Organization “good” or “bad”? : An Examination of Ethical Organizational Anthropomorphism. In: Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2022, 2022-08-05 - 2022-08-09, Seattle.

Abstract

We elaborate the meaning of organisational anthropomorphism from an ethical perspective. We propose that organisational anthropomorphism is mediated by members’ evaluation of the organisational legitimacy. An organisation that has legitimacy from all relevant audiences has a strong organisational identity (through the alignment of personal, relational and social identity levels) and exemplifies “good individualism”, as opposed to “bad individualism”. Members ought to use positive anthropomorphism to describe good individualism and negative anthropomorphism to describe bad individualism. However, in practice, members may be prevented from recognising bad individualism through the effect of organisational identification on their moral’s self conceptions. When this happens, they will use positive anthropomorphism to describe bad individualism. We account for this by distinguishing between “organisational” self esteem and self continuity from “moral” self esteem and self continuity, and arguing that the latter will be overlooked in situations of loss aversion. KEY WORDS: Positive and Negative Organizational Anthropomorphism, Self Esteem, Self Continuity, Organizational Identity, Loss Aversion, Organizational Legitimacy