Berzonsky and Blasi

How are the learning defenses to be mitigated? How is the learning that can lead to
identiy change be promoted? Our understanding of the dyanamics to idchange derives
from the work of Berzonsky and Blasi, for whom self-concept developmenty involves the
management of three interdependent components: process, the means by which identity
is encoded; structure: the way identity is organized; content: the information from which
reality is constructed.
If the self-concept is an answer to the question, " who and what am i?" then in general, the
answer consists of achieving a new unity among elements of one's past and expectations
about the future and this creates a deep and fundamental sense of purposeful continuity.
This is a process of intergration and questiontion. The answer to these questions leads to
integration, a sense of basic loyalty and fidelity as well as deep, preconscious feelings of
rootedness and well-being, self-esteem, and purposefulness.
Learning that promotes identity change thus involves a resynthesis or reintegration of the
processual, structural, and content aspects of self in a way that defends against anxiety and
satisfies the need for self-esteem.
However, althogh identity provides meaning, premature closure of identity exploration processes,
or too tight a closure around an over-defined identity, in inimical to the multiple and alternate
meanings that make organization development possible.
Senior managements role in the learning organization is to surface and contest existing mental
models and to build shared visions of the future.
Organizational identity may assumes that the senior managers have everyone's
best interest at heart. However, if someone has assumed and then abandoned previously
self-identifing factors in the past, when the goals of the new organization promote conflicting
views, the person will re-evaluate relationship strength with the current group, whether or not
there exists a possibility of rejoining the old group. This is how the fluidity of self-ascribed
identities weaken as the number of abandoned identities hinder the acceptance of new
organization by means of skepticism.