Says who? How the match between the social identity of organizations and their audiences increases perceptions of organizational authenticity

Abstract

Research shows that people systematically prefer “authentic” organizations above organizations that are not deemed authentic. Yet, people who desire authenticity may also be unable to detect what is authentic. We propose that endorsement by audiences that match the organization’s identity may provide a useful cue for authenticity. Using an experimental approach, we test for audience effects in the context of online reviews about a restaurant’s authenticity and find that reviewers whose ethnic identity match the restaurant’s cuisine are more influential on third-party perceptions of authenticity and subsequent liking of the restaurant. These experiments demonstrate that the effect works through a stereotype-based inferred expertise mechanism, but do not provide support to the “mere presence” and “ingroup-homophily” mechanisms. We discuss the scope conditions of our theory and explore how our general theory of audience-organization identity match applies to organizations besides restaurants, to audience characteristic besides ethnicity, and to organizational characteristics beside authenticity.