As the workforce becomes increasingly diverse, motivating individuals from different backgrounds to work together effectively is a major challenge facing organizations. In an experiment conducted at a large public university in the United States, we manipulate the salience of participants’ multidimensional natural identities and investigate the effects of identity on coordination and cooperation in a series of minimum-effort and prisoner’s dilemma games. By priming a fragmenting (ethnic) identity, we find that, compared to the control, participants are significantly less likely to choose high effort in the minimum-effort games, leading to less efficient coordination. In comparison, priming a common organization (school) identity significantly increases the choice of a rational joint payoff maximizing strategy in a prisoner’s dilemma game.

Students from the two ethnic groups, Caucasians and Asians, at University of Michigan participated in the lab experiments.