The social identity of an individual is linked to their knowledge of their membership in certain social groups and the resulting emotional and evaluative consequences of that membership. According to Tajfel and Turner, social identification impacts the choice of activities that are congruent with this identity, in-group cooperation and cohesion, and internalization of group values and beliefs. Social identities help us in part to answer the fundamental question, who am I? To the extent that an individual identifies with a social category, this will influence their attitudes and behaviors according to the stereotypical qualities of the category in question. According to social interactionism, this identification gives us a shared meaning concerning who we are, which is reflected through our interactions with others, and generally simplifies and makes possible our interactions with our social environment. For example, when a far east Asian person associates being Asian with conciliatory, non-conflictual behaviors, they tend to adopt these qualities as standards for their own behaviors. In doing so, they receive confirmatory feedback from both in group and out group others, which allows them to have meaningful interactions. In addition, diversity categories are more often than not directly correlated with a power and prestige order, according to status characteristics theory. For example, studies have confirmed that men have higher power and prestige than women, particularly in task oriented, mixed sex teams - which by the way, are the exact conditions we find in the workplace. Similarly, ethnicity and race have been found to have a power and prestige order in different cultures and societies. Simon and Halstead demonstrated that people are more likely to locate themselves along socially positive characteristics that are associated with collective categories. What this means is that, since dominant social groups, for example, men in leadership, or heterosexuals, are associated with more positive characteristics in comparison to minorities - for example, women in leadership, or gay men, those belonging to dominant social groups can more easily experience a positive social identity. Judith Howard considers that this is ‘a challenge for members of stigmatized, negatively valued groups’ in order to manage their social identity they may develop strategies such as ‘disassociating themselves from the in-group in question, or evaluating the distinguishing dimensions of their in-group as less negative, or rating the in-group as more favorable on other dimensions, or choosing to negotiate to produce changes in the relative status of the groups’. Along the same lines, in considering racial and ethnic identity, Fordham and Ogbu provide an understanding of academic under-performance among African-American students in the US as a desire on their part to maintain their racial identity and solidarity with the African-American experience. They explain how good students will intentionally perform badly academically, in order to assert their African-American in-group identity. In this context, high achieving African-American students may experience an internal identity conflict, and ambivalence, and end up taking on a raceless persona. This raceless persona is not without psychological cost for the high achieving student, leading to negative evaluations of the in-group, or identification with non-racial elements of the out-group. In another example, members of the LGBTQIA+ community talk about the difficulties they encounter in the workplace and the impact on their decision to come out or not. In work environments that are hostile to the LGBTQIA+community, gay professionals, for example, encounter challenges to maintaining a positive social identity. As a consequence, they may disguise their sexual orientation by creating a fictitious wife and children with whom they spend fictitious holidays, in order to fit in and not be stigmatized or passed over for promotions. However, these efforts have an overall negative psychological impact due to the internal inconsistencies that this creates, as well as the cognitive effort that this requires to maintain real and fictitious experiences and existence. These identity phenomena can also be extended to other social categories. Social identity is a key element in our response to the question, who am I? At the same time, diversity categories are laden with a positive identity for dominant social groups and negative identity for minority groups which can be explained by the in-group, out-group bias and the power advantage of dominant social groups. Members of minority and disadvantaged social groups can experience negative psychological consequences of their social identity. In the workplace, this becomes a long term cost not only for the individual but also for the firm.
