Social Context Effects on Employee Organizational Identification

The main objective of our study is to advance research on how organizational identification occurs. Prior work generally assumes that employees make conscious decisions about how closely to identify with the organization, and employees make these decisions relatively independently of one another and based, to a large degree, on how well they are individually treated by the organization. Our study addresses these assumptions. We integrate social information processing, social contagion, and social identification literatures to theorize about how coworker organizational identification, as a major feature of employees’ social context, influences employees’ identification with the organization through two main routes. First, coworker identification transfers, in part, directly to employees by way of social contagion mechanisms that may involve comparatively little conscious deliberation. Second, and to the extent that identification results from conscious decision-making, coworker identification shapes employ...