Making Use of Organizational Identity - Authentic Organizations

that receive it, when a symbol moves beyond the culture that created it some of its original
meaning is still embedded in and carried by that artifact (Hatch & Schultz, 2001).
Transformable. To discuss organizational identity and develop shared understanding
that incorporates different viewpoints and new information, organizations need a way to
represent different interests, facilitate negotiation, and allow members jointly to transform
organizational identity beliefs. Carrie provided a concrete means for working out these
challenges. First, an important feature of Carrie was that every organization member had a basic
understanding of how to use her to communicate with other organization members. As a human
character, Carrie was a familiar kind of object to interpret, respond to, and understand. Every
organization member had some ability to understand another person’s personality, to interpret
their life story, and to anticipate how another person might respond to situations. The idea that
Carrie was another person also made it possible for organization members to empathize with her
and imagine their selves in her shoes (Gillett, 1993). Unlike reading a blueprint, for example,
understanding another person does not require any special expertise or training. Members could
use Carrie to represent new ideas as well as new interpretations about what defined the
organization, to experiment with how these attributes could be expressed through organizational
decisions and behaviors, and to consider the implications of proposed changes. And, with each
use of Carrie, members got more skillful at using the tool and better at discussing issues of
organizational identity.
Proposition Three: An icon makes it easier to share beliefs about the organization across
groups and across time because it helps to make information relatively more reliable,
transferable and transformable.
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