Encouraging employees or members to disassociate themselves from certain aspects of an organization's identity can be an effective management strategy for accomplishing change, according to an associate professor at the University of California, Davis. "Getting people to disconnect from an existing corporate or organizational identity is really key in getting them to connect to a new one," says Kim Elsbach of the Graduate School of Management. "Before they can go from the old to the new they have to go through this sort of purgatory or limbo point." Elsbach cites Saturn Corp. and the National Rifle Association as two organizations that have used "disidentification" -- Saturn, to set itself apart from the problems associated with the big automakers (such as its parent company, General Motors) and the NRA, to shed what was a more extremist image in the mid-1990s. With C.B. Bhattacharya of Boston University's School of Management, Elsbach has studied organizational disidentification or how individuals define themselves based on their differences from organizations. Their article, "Defining Who You Are by What You're Not: A Study of Organizational Disidentification and the National Rifle Association," has been accepted for publication in the management journal Organization Science. The professors found that organizational disidentification is a self-perception based not only on a separation between one's identify and the organization's identity, but also on a negative characterization of the relationship between the individual and the organization. Disidentification, they concluded, is motivated by individuals' desires both to affirm their positive differences from a negatively perceived organization and to fend off potential threats to their existing social identity from incongruent values and negative stereotypes attributed to that organization. Elsbach and Bhattacharya's study included focus groups and a survey of public attitudes about the NRA.