The Pride in Being a “Vaudevillian”

After a few weeks at Vaudeville Ventures, I have been able to conclude that an organization’s effectiveness can be attributed, in part, to strong group salience. Hogg defines the social identity theory of leadership as “arguing that the most effective leader-member relationship will depend on how self-conceptually salient the group is and on how strongly members identify with the group.” Even though Vaudeville Ventures is a young, small company, there is a strong sense of camaraderie and understanding that everyone, regardless of his or her role or seniority, is working towards a common goal.

The three execs at Vaudeville, while they have different life experiences, drive the company’s social identity. Their different skills and experiences allow them to contribute to the company’s diversity of talent in different ways: one exec worked as a Chief Creative at AOL, another’s career was in investment and commercial banking prior to starting Vaudeville Ventures, and the last has worked in marketing, sales, and business development. Despite their assortment of past experiences, they have helped to construct a strong identity at Vaudeville. They pride themselves on their diversity of experience and how they are able to band together to build and grow businesses. A prime example of the three execs working in the most Vaudevillian way is the start-up that the three of them have started and are currently working on. They constantly leverage the fact that the three of them together represent a wide variety of past experience, and that their work on their start-up is flourishing because of how they take advantage of their breadth of experience.

The way the execs identify with being “Vaudevillian” helps the rest of the team buy into strong group salience. People who work at VV call themselves Vaudevillians, but there isn’t a prototype of employees here. The team is diverse in gender, race, past experiences, and personality type. In many ways, the group of characters that makes up the team embodies the name of the organization. Vaudeville was an entertainment act that was popular in the 20th century that was made up by an assortment of different acts. The people at Vaudeville Ventures pride themselves in their unique-ness – just by observing the way they interact during meetings and on the Slack channels, it is obvious that people are proud of the things that make them part of team at Vaudeville. By valuing their own and others’ membership at Vaudeville Ventures, people feel more inclined to be inventive, productive and do the best work they can.

I have mixed feelings about Hogg’s hypothesis about leader prototypicality and perceptions of effectiveness/actual effectiveness in high-salience groups. From my initial observations, the organization is extremely effective and there is high group salience. However, the leadership is not prototypical of the group. The three execs are all straight white males in their 40s, while the rest of the team is much younger and more diverse in gender, sexuality and race. I’m not sure if the group would be more effective if the leaders of Vaudeville Ventures were more prototypical of the group because I’m not able to perform an experiment about that – my guess is yes, probably, and this is a question that many organizations around the world should be asking. Where the leadership at Vaudeville lacks in prototypicality of the group, I think it makes up for some of that in their diversity of personality, acceptance of others, and openness, which is observable in their choice of employees. The question of leader prototypicality and group effectiveness is part of a much larger societal issue, and the answer to it can only be found if organizations start diversifying their leadership.