Organizational Rituals: Their Functions and Mechanisms.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Anja Göritz
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 263726627

Collective rituals are ubiquitous in business and other organizations and are a vital part of organizational culture. A prominent function of collective ritual is the enhancement of group cohesion. However, it is unknown by what mechanism collective ritual increases group cohesion. To date, research on organizational ritual is sparse; it is dominated by case studies and lacks a stringent test of theoretical models as well as an integration of theory and practice. This project identifies and tests ritual ingredients that enhance group cohesion in both laboratory and field settings to broaden and deepen scientific understanding as well as to provide practitioners with knowledge of how to effectively manage organizational rituals. In detail, the project closes research gaps by (1) identifying relevant ritual examples, characteristics, prerequisites and consequences in the organizational context from interviews with employees, (2) meta-analyzing hitherto empirical evidence on ritual mechanisms, (3) developing a ritual theory and testing and refining it in a laboratory experiment, and (4) testing the refined ritual theory in three longitudinal field experiments, thereby ensuring robustness and external validity of the findings. The project's results enable evidence-based design and introduction of cohesion-enhancing rituals, which benefit individual employees as well as entire organizations, especially small and medium-sized enterprises: Group cohesion at work has been shown to prevent physiological and psychological affliction among employees and it mitigates the effect of demographic change and skill shortages in organizations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants