Collective Representations in Organizations: A Case-study of a Working Group

The notion of collective representation: an ambiguous concept The notion of collective representations in organizations appears to be crucial to our understanding of decision processes, organizational action and performance, and change and learning in organizations. For instance, collective representations are sometimes assumed to polarize attention to specific problems and to provide guidelines for interpreting environmental information, thus facilitating choices during decision-making processes and implementation (Klimoski and Mohammed, 1994; Beyer, 1981); Organizational learning is generally viewed as entailing the ability to share common understandings so as to exploit it (Fiol, 1994); And, in a similar perspective, organizational change is often defined as involving the development of new understandings of the organizational goals and their dissemination among organizational members, so that their new schemas fit current experience (Poole et al., 1989). Although researchers in organizational studies have increasingly integrated the notion of collective representation into their theories, we seem to have ended up with a very loose, even flimsy, concept at the group and the organizational levels (Klimoski and Mohammed, 1994). For one thing, whereas the cognitive perspective defines collective representations as stable systems of shared ideas or beliefs (Hedberg, 1981; Beyer, 1981; Sproull, 1981), some researchers consider that organized action is not dependent on shared meanings (Weick, 1979; Donnellon et al., 1986). Alternatively, a socio-cognitive perspective (derived from social psychology) argues that collective representations are emerging constructions which exhibit different forms, different emergence processes, and different relationships with the individual level of cognition – depending in part on the participative mode of group members and the relationships between them (Codol, 1984). What does a collective representation consist of? How does it emerge from the supposedly different representations held by individuals? In this study, a small group working on safety at the workplace in a French paper plant is used as a longitudinal case study to explore the nature and the emergence process of collective representations in groups. Through analysis of the commonality and similarity of group members' representations over time, the consensus developed, conflict negotiation processes, and the thinking mode of group members during their interactions, the study tries to elucidate 1/ the nature of the collective representation developed, 2/ the main socio-cognitive dynamics which occurred during the group work. The results suggest that collective representations may endow different forms and different emergence processes depending on the way conflicts are expressed and solved during the group work, and on the thinking mode adopted by group members during their discussions. This implies to pay particular attention to the participative mode activated by group members during their interactions and to the context in which they interact, if one wishes to promote innovative ideas and new collective understandings in groups.