A temporary organization refers to a set of organizational actors working together on a complex task over a limited period of time. As the world has become more dynamic and interconnected, temporary organizations have been increasingly employed across diverse industries like construction, film-making, shipbuilding, software development, advertising, biotechnology, and fashion. Yet despite their increased prevalence, temporary organizations are struggling to foster and maintain coherent social norms. As opposed to traditional, long-term organizations, most members of temporary organizations possess different organizational backgrounds and a relatively short tenure. This project will investigate how employees' behaviors can be better aligned with desirable social norms through the reconciliation of multiple foci of organizational identifications in temporary organizations. The researchers will use construction workers' safety behavior as a case study of employee behavior in a temporary organization. The construction industry provides a particularly useful site for inquiry due to its central role in our economy, its wide use of temporary organizations, its status as among the most dangerous industries in the world, and the pervasiveness of accidents caused by workers' unsafe behaviors.
The project will extend theories on temporary organizations and organizational identification by characterizing the mechanisms through which desirable social norms are translated into organizational members' behaviors with the help of organizational identification. The project will incorporate diverse empirical data collection methods (e.g., survey, behavioral economic experiment, and behavior sampling) and analyses to investigate the role of multiple organizational backgrounds and social norms in shaping employee behavior in a temporary organization. In addition, working with the industry partners, the researchers will conduct quasi-field experiments to develop and test a series of one-time, short-term managerial training that can promote employees' social identification with the umbrella organization and ultimately to elicit desired changes in improving employees' behavior. The results will greatly contribute to the advancement of social identity theory and organization studies. Further, by identifying effective managerial actions/strategies to increase workers' project identification, the project will contribute to the development of organizational actions/strategies that can overcome heterogeneous organizational backgrounds and short tenure issues in a temporary organization, which will eventually improve employee behaviors like safety. Finally, this project will provide career development opportunities for diverse groups of students. The effective education of students and professionals for social influence-based management approaches will increase the competitiveness of U.S industries.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
