Long Lost : The emotional side of identification - Complementing SIT with psychoanalytic insights

Summary, in English

In this essay, I aim to complement social identity theory (SIT) concepts of identification with insights from psychoanalysis to address three problematic aspects: (a) SIT emphasizes cognition and often neglects emotions, (b) emotions—if mentioned —are primarily positive, and (c) SIT-based concepts can be used to inspire simplified ideas of identification management. I argue that psychoanalytic insights can help us attend to these problematic aspects and help us advance our understanding of identification in organizations: they add an emotional focus on identification that can better explain strong relationships than a cognitive focus alone; they add the full range of emotions (positive to negative), which means that identification can also go along with negative emotions; and they also add a distinction between identification and narcissistic attachments that involve different motivations, dynamics, and predictive potentials. I illustrate these points in an example from Pratt and highlight implications for future research.

• Author: Monika Müller
• Publishing year: 2017-01
• Language: English
• Pages: 3-16
• Publication/Series: Journal of Management Inquiry
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 1
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1056492616646453
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Topic: Psychology (excluding Applied Psychology)
• Keywords: identification; social identity theory; psychoanalysis; emotions; narcissistic attachment; ambivalence
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1056-4926