MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONS


Do Companies Tink and Feel? Mind Perception of Organizations


SIMONE TANG ASSISTANT PROFESSOR


Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration


Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Cornell University


Co-authors • Simone Tang


Assistant Professor, Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel


Administration, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University • Kurt Gray, University North Carolina-Chapel Hill


Summary How do people perceive the minds of organizations? Existing work on orga-


nizational mind perception highlights two key debates: whether organiza- tional groups are ascribed more agency than experience, and whether people perceive minds in organizational groups at all. With this paper, Tang and Gray weigh in on these debates and suggest that organizations can indeed be ascribed experiential minds, presenting a “member and goals” framework for systematically understanding the mind perception of organization. Trough four studies, this framework suggests that people can perceive the organi- zational mind through its elemental building blocks: members (people who form the organization) and goals (its aims). Results reveal that people ascribe agency and experience to organizations based on whether the members of organizations and the goals of the organization are characterized by agency or experience.


Study 1 finds that past work on mind perception often examines for-profit corporations, which consist of agentic members (corporate professionals) and agentic goals (market competition). Studies 2 and 3 reveal that for an organi- zation with members and goals high (vs. low) in experience, people imbue its mind with perceived experience—equal to that of a person—and that even emotions low in warmth (i.e., anger) can imbue an organization with such perceptions. Study 4 shows the moral consequences of emphasizing experi- ence: after organizational wrongdoing, experiential organizations are seen to deliver more sincere apologies and are more forgiven.


Cognitive Science 47, 8, August 2023 LINK TO PAPER LINK TO VIDEO


TO IMPACT CONTENTS


RESEARCH WITH IMPACT: CORNELL SC JOHNSON COLLEGE OF BUSINESS • 2023 EDITION


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