Johnson College of Business, Cornell University.
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Cogn Sci. 2023 Aug;47(8):e13320. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13320.
How do people perceive the minds of organizations? Existing work on organizational mind perception highlights two key debates: whether organizational groups are ascribed more agency than experience, and whether people are really perceiving minds in organizational groups at all. Our current paper and its data weigh in on these debates and suggest that organizations can indeed be ascribed experiential minds. We present a "member and goals" framework for systematically understanding the mind perception of organization. This framework suggests that people can perceive the organizational mind through its elemental building blocks: members (people who form the organization) and goals (its aims). Four studies 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 when an organization 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 experience: after organizational wrongdoing, experiential organizations are seen to deliver more sincere apologies and are more forgiven.
人们如何感知组织的心智？现有关于组织心智感知的研究强调了两个关键的争论：组织群体是否被赋予了比经验更多的能动性，以及人们是否真的在组织群体中感知到了心智。我们目前的论文及其数据对这些争论进行了权衡，并表明组织确实可以被赋予经验性心智。我们提出了一个“成员和目标”框架，用于系统地理解组织的心智感知。该框架表明，人们可以通过组织的基本组成部分来感知组织的心智：成员（组成组织的人）和目标（其目的）。四项研究表明，人们根据组织成员和组织目标是否具有能动性或经验来赋予组织能动性和经验。研究 1 发现，心智感知的过往研究通常考察营利性公司，这些公司由有能动性的成员（企业专业人士）和有能动性的目标（市场竞争）组成。研究 2 和 3 揭示了当一个组织的成员和目标具有高（低）经验时，人们会赋予其心智被感知到的经验——与一个人的经验相等——甚至是温暖程度低的情绪（即愤怒）也可以赋予组织这种感知。研究 4 表明了强调经验的道德后果：在组织犯错之后，具有经验的组织被认为会做出更真诚的道歉，并得到更多的原谅。
