L’effet du changement organisationnel et social discontinu sur la clarté de l’identité collective : le rôle des comparaisons temporelles pour la reconstruction identitaire

Rapid and profound changes are increasingly common, both in the workplace and in society. These rapid and profound changes to social groups, called discontinuous changes, are known to have deleterious effects on the psychological well-being of individuals. Literature has proposed that discontinuous organizational and social changes are challenging because they disrupt individuals’ collective identity, which provides them with a meaningful frame of reference in which they understand their social environment and themselves. It has been proposed that during discontinuous changes, collective identity suffers from a decrease in clarity, where individuals question who they are in the context of their social group. Recent studies confirm that discontinuous social change causes a decrease in collective identity clarity. However, the link between discontinuous changes and collective identity clarity remains tentative since no study has experimentally manipulated a real experienced change in a social group. Finally, it remains to be seen whether the decrease in collective identity clarity following discontinuous social change is empirically replicated in the field. The first goal is therefore to provide robust empirical support to the proposition that discontinuous change causes a decrease of collective identity clarity, in a context of real experienced change. In addition, the psychological processes that determine how individuals restore collective identity clarity following discontinuous change remain unknown to this day. Literature in social psychology argues that there are two processes of comparison fundamental to the construction of collective identity, namely social comparisons and temporal comparisons. Temporal comparisons appear to be more prevalent in a context of discontinuous change, but their role in restoring collective identity clarity has not been verified. The second goal of this thesis is to verify whether temporal comparisons are a psychological process that restores collective identity clarity following a discontinuous change.  Five studies divided into two articles were carried out to meet both goals. The first article fills the gaps raised in previous literature by presenting a new experimental paradigm: the Lego Workgroup Paradigm (LWP). This experimental paradigm simulates a work group and exposes its members to a real experienced discontinuous change, operationalized as an unexpected change in the values that guide the work objectives. Three studies test the hypothesis that the introduction of a discontinuous change will reduce levels of collective identity clarity related to the workgroup. Study 1 simulates a discontinuous change transforming the values in a sudden way from collaborative values to competition values. Study 2 replicates the results of Study 1 with different opposing values of efficiency and innovation. The third study replicates the results and methodology of Study 1 with a large sample that allows statistical control for the non-independence of observations. The three studies support the hypothesis that the introduction of a discontinuous change causes a decrease in collective identity clarity related to the work group. The second article contains two studies conducted with Americans, in the context of the change of presidential administration in 2016. The first study aims to validate whether the clarity of the collective identity is diminished as a result of a discontinuous change in a field setting (hypothesis 1). Then, an intervention using temporal comparisons is tested to verify if it restores collective identity clarity (hypothesis 2a). The degree of effectiveness of the intervention using temporal comparisons is contrasted with an intervention using social comparisons, an intervention using social and temporal comparisons and a control condition. The second study verifies whether the intervention using temporal comparisons restores collective identity clarity beyond the effect of the passage of time (hypothesis 2b), and beyond other interventions. The results confirm the decrease in collective identity clarity as a result of the election’s outcome and the role of temporal comparisons to restore the collective identity clarity.

Keyphrases: Changement discontinu social, Discontinuous social change, Discontinuous organizational change, Collective identity clarity, Temporal comparisons, Social comparisons