Contingencies between organizational identification and professional employee performance

Abstract

Organizational identification research demonstrates only weak support for the central hypothesis that organizational identification motivates employees to pursue organizational goals. I show that the influence of organizational identification on organization-benefiting behaviors is more complex than previously thought and depends on employees' (1) competing types of identification, such as professional identification, (2) perceptions regarding administrative treatment, and (3) perceptions regarding the prescribed organizational goal-attainment strategy. My first two studies show that the combination of organizational identification and professional identification influences the degree to which professionals engage in organization-benefiting behaviors. Moreover, I find that the combination of professional and organizational identification also influences the way that professionals behaviorally respond to perceived administrative treatment. In my first study I find that for professional employees who identify strongly with the organization and weakly with the profession, perceived beneficial and detrimental discretionary administrative treatment motivate better performance. In my second study I find that such professional employees are most likely to conform to administrative social influence and adopt technology that enhances organizational profitability and reduces professional service quality. Finally, in my third study, I demonstrate that the influence of organizational identification on professional employee performance depends on each employee's perception of the best organizational goal-attainment strategy. I find that highly organizationally identified professional employees who perceive the organization as prescribing a success-maximizing goal-attainment strategy have the lowest performance quality; whereas highly organizationally identified professional employees perceive the organization as prescribing a failure-minimizing strategy have the highest performance quality.