Theories in Action

Social Identity at GDD

The past few weeks of my internship have been busy with preparing for a new site reboot and finalizing my first post on the company blog. Through multiple weekly meetings I have been able to learn more about Amanda and Hannah, and their leadership styles.

According to Social Identity Theory, group members with a shared identity will favor those who best represent the group. At Go Dash Dot, we try to appeal to a market of women who are always on the go – working out, going to work and going out afterward, and naturally, the business framework came from Hannah’s (CEO) own experience. By recognizing a hole within a market that she fits into, she was able to build her brand. Thus, she is the ultimate example of GDD’s social identity. However, Amanda (Social Media Manager), who is slightly more outgoing that Hannah, comes off as the natural leader because she’s candid and energetic toward expanding the company’s outreach and goals.

Both Hannah and Amanda fully believe in open communication and aim to have their internship program be as informative as it could be from a remote platform. They stressed to us in the beginning to always ask questions, communicate with them about our workloads, and request to be included on different meetings, if it’s a topic that catches our attention. This background is all to say that from GDD’s construct of social identity, Amanda is the more apparent and dominant leader, in my experience, because she is our direct supervisor, and she is always asking us for feedback and organizing meetings. It is easier to identify Amanda as the leader of our intern group because she often comes up with tasks for us to do, while Hannah is more so there to oversee the work that Amanda is giving us and to offer a large-scale company vision for future weeks. Through studying social identity theory more, and through applying it to my personal experience, I was surprised to see how quickly I did connect with Amanda more than Hannah because of the function of our relationships. While I imagined to work more with Hannah because of her vision for the blog and the company’s summer goals, Amanda has really emerged as the leader because of her involvement with our direct tasks. She is always providing me feedback on my blog post dates in coordination with certain social media posts, and she sometimes pitches new ideas to me. I also recognize, as I briefly mentioned, that Amanda’s extraversion makes her the more apparent leader between her and Hannah, however; Hannah’s conscientiousness and vision of GDD’s future still makes her the most effective leader, aside from her actual position as the founder of the company.