“Optimal Distinctiveness Revisited: an Integrative Framework for Understanding the Balance between Differentiation and Conformity in Individual and Organizational Identities”, 2016-09-01 (; similar):
This chapter integrates 3 approaches to the question of why successful identities—individual and organizational—generally involve a balance between conformity to others’ practices and differentiation from them.
An entertaining model is employed to highlight the limitations of the “optimal distinctiveness” and the “different audiences” approaches.
A third approach—“two-stage valuation”—is then shown to address these limitations. It is also demonstrated that this approach provides a general foundation for understanding the balance between conformity and differentiation. The advantages of this framework are (a) parsimony, as it requires no unnecessary behavioral assumptions; (b) generality, as it applies at both the individual and organizational levels of analysis and is capable of incorporating the distinctive observations of the other 2 approaches; and (d) extensibility, as it is capable of illuminating outstanding puzzles, such as why closely resembling others may sometimes convey legitimacy but may sometimes be a problematic sign of inauthenticity.
[Keywords: conformity, differentiation, valuation, identity, audience]