Brewing Up Cooperation Between Competitors

Recently, scholars have sought to understand situations in which organizational actors demonstrate cooperative behavior within competitive environments. However, such work has tended to restrict analysis to the firm (rather than the individual) level and has generally assumed instrumental motives for the cooperation with competitors. By proposing and exploring a novel form of identity—identification with an industry segment—we find support for social identity as a motivation for cooperation (Tyler, 2001) even within a competitive context. Utilizing a sample of employees from the craft beer industry, we find evidence of an industry-level identity distinct from organizational identity that uniquely predicts cooperative behavior between competitors. Our investigation substantially contributes to literatures exploring the tension between cooperation and competition by analyzing the phenomenon at an individual level and demonstrating that people not only cooperate for instrumental reasons but that identification with a social group is a meaningful pathway to cooperation between competitors.