The relationship between organizational identification and organizational
culture: Employee perceptions of culture and identification in a retail
sales organization
Abstract:
This study explored the relationship between organizational identification
and organizational culture in a retail sales organization. Participants included
76 employees from 31 different store locations who completed Cheney's (1983b)
Organizational Identification Questionnaire and Glaser, Zamanou, and Hacker's
(1987) Organizational Culture Survey. Copyright Central States Speech Association
Summer 2002
Full Text:
This study explored the relationship between organizational identification
and organizational culture in a retail sales organization. Participants included
76 employees from 31 different store locations who completed Cheney's (1983b)
Organizational Identification Questionnaire and Glaser, Zamanou, and Hacker's
(1987) Organizational Culture Survey. Confirmatory factor analyses, as well
as tests of parallelism, were conducted to confirm the dimensional structure
and internal consistency of both measurements. Although six dimensions of
organizational culture were significantly related to organizational identification,
employee morale emerged as the only significant predictor of employee identification.
Implications of these results, as well as directions for future research,
are discussed.
As information technology facilitates the globalization of organizations,
management is faced with the responsibility of adapting to a rapidly changing
environment filled with uncertainty and anxiety. "In response to the anxiety
of the present, organizations have increasingly turned to control systems
that demand high levels of worker identification" (Barker & Tompkins,
1994, p. 239). According to Tompkins and Cheney (1985), organizational identification
occurs when a decision-maker (i.e., an employee) chooses an alternative that
best promotes the perceived interests of the organization. Extant research
has linked organizational identification to a wide variety of organizational
phenomena and behaviors including organizational house organs (Cheney, 1983b),
organizational commitment (Cheney & Tompkins, 1987), decisionmaking premises
(Bullis & Tompkins, 1989), organizational socialization (Bullis &
Bach, 1989), self-managing teams (Barker & Tompkins, 1994) and supervisor
communication behaviors (Myers & Kassing, 1998). Collectively, this research
has suggested that identification influences and is influenced by organizational
processes and perceptions (Myers & Kassing, 1998).
Although previous researchers have focused on factors related to varying
levels of employee identification and commitment, such as absenteeism (Angle
& Perry, 1981) and turnover (Porter, Crampton, & Smith, 1976), much
less is known concerning antecedents of organizational identification. Bullis
and Bach (1991) reported that multiplex network relationships were positively
related to identification, leading them to suggest that identification is
influenced by the presence of social interaction. Likewise, Myers and Kassing
(1998) discovered that supervisor communication competence was a significant
predictor of subordinate identification, and Bullis and Bach (1989) concluded
that identification is integrally related to organizational socialization.
Most of this research, however, investigated undergraduates' experiences
with summer jobs (Myers & Kassing, 1998) and graduate students' experiences
with departmental socialization (Bullis & Bach, 1989). This study sought
to extend existing research on organizational identification by exploring
the relationship between employee perceptions of organizational culture and
identification within a retail sales organization. Flamholtz (1995) argued
that at the apex of strategic organizational development is the development
of an appropriate organizational culture within which management feels it
can guide the organization. Given Cheney and Tompkins' (1987) assertion that
organizational identification is as much a continuous process as it is a
product, employee perceptions of an organization's culture may influence
levels of employee identification with the organization.
Organizational Identification and Unobtrusive Control
Burke (1950, 1973) originally articulated the construct of identification
as a fundamental component of the dialectic between segregation and congregation.
Extending Burke's original scheme, Cheney (1983b) offered the individual-organization
relationship as an exemplar for understanding the rhetoric of identification.
According to Cheney (1983a) an individual who is inclined to identify with
an organization would be open to persuasive efforts from various sources
within an organization. Further, an individual's inclination to identify
with his or her organization is influenced through both self- and other-inducement.
Although an employee has the ability to identify spontaneously with a target
such as an organization, the identification process is often facilitated
by the organization in its dealings with the employee (Cheney, 1983a). "The
organization 'initiates' this inducement process by communicating values,
goals, and information (i.e., the organization's own stated 'identifications')
in the form of decisional premises..." (Cheney, 1983a, p. 347). Thus, the
inherent value of identification to the organization is manifested in the
subordinate's decision-making processes, processes that are often guided
by values, goals, and information previously inculcated by the organization.
This research led to the development of Tompkins and Cheney's (1985) theory
of unobtrusive control in organizations. According to this theory, modern
organizations seek to control organizational environments (i.e., the actions
of employees) through subtle and systematic manipulation of the rhetorical
environment (Myers & Kassing, 1998). More importantly, Tompkins and Cheney
(1985) conceptualized concertive control, a new and postbureaucratic form
of control that stresses teamwork, flexibility and innovation, blurring of
hierarchical levels, and relative value consensus. "In the concertive organization,
the explicit written rules and regulations are largely replaced by the common
understanding of values, objectives, and means of achievement, along with
a deep appreciation for the organization's 'mission"' (Tompkins & Cheney,
1985, p. 184). In other words, the organization communicates its values,
goals, and information in the form of decisional premises in hopes that the
employee will complete the identification process by adopting the aforementioned
premises and by making decisions that are "best" for the organization (Cheney,
1983a).
Recent research into the nature of organizational identification has supported
Tompkins and Cheney's (1985) theory. Barker and Tompkins (1994) discovered
that employees maintained a tendency to identify more strongly with their
individual work teams than with the company as a whole, and that the strength
of employee identification increased with years of tenure on the job. Bullis
and Bach (1989), however, suggested that time and tenure may decrease identification
between the member and the organization. They identified certain events,
such as informal recognition, "getting away," and alienation, as having the
greatest immediate impact on identification. More importantly, perceived
mismatches typically occurred as newcomers heard or observed organizational
values, goals, and collective experiences that were different from their
own experiences (Bullis & Bach, 1989).
Despite the value of extant research on organizational identification, Miller,
Allen, Casey, and Johnson (2000) have recently called into question the most
widely used measurement of employee identification: Cheney's (1983a) Organizational
Identification Questionnaire. Evidently, confirmatory factor analyses across
four different organizations revealed that the OIQ might indeed be a broad
measure of affective commitment to the organization rather than a measure
of employee identification. Miller and his colleagues (2000) called for a
moratorium on the use of the OIQ and suggested several ways that researchers
might attempt to operationalize identification so as to avoid confusion with
affective commitment. Consequently, their research brings into question the
validity and reliability of extant research on organizational identification.
The antecedents of organizational commitment are well documented (e.g., Allen
& Meyer, 1990; Caldwell, Chatman, & O'Reilly, 1990). Cheney and Tompkins
(1987) argued, however, that identification and commitment are two separate,
yet interdependent constructs. Identification is the "substance" of an individual-organization
relationship and commitment is the "form". Apparently, identification is
a more potent term for analyzing the individual-organization process because
it readily suggests both process and product (Cheney & Tompkins, 1987).
Commitment, on the other hand, tends to narrow the scope of something an
individual or employee has or makes at a particular point in time (Cheney
& Tompkins, 1987). Thus, this investigation focused on the former, rather
than the latter.
Since organizations are moving towards the implementation of concertive control
practices (e.g., Barker & Tompkins, 1994; Tompkins & Cheney, 1985),
and these practices are often guided by the values, goals, and beliefs (or
the culture) of the organization, a relationship between an organization's
culture and employee levels of identification appears tenable. If employee
identification is both a process and a product that is influenced by certain
elements of an organization's culture, then organizational managers may benefit
from research which identifies the dimensions of culture most directly tied
to employee levels of identification.
The Influence of Organizational Culture
Over the last two decades, a substantial body of research has accumulated
regarding the nature and prevalence of organizational culture (Amsa, 1986;
Brown, 1992; Gamble & Gibson, 1999; Glaser, Zamanou, & Hacker, 1987;
Hofstede, Neuijen, Ohayv, & Sanders, 1990; Lindbo & Shultz, 1998;
Martin, 1992; Rousseau, 1990; Schein, 1990; Witmer, 1997). Although scholars
have reached a relative consensus regarding the existence of a "culture"
in every organization, "The term 'culture' connotes a certain degree of imprecision
and it is difficult to find a measure of agreement about its meaning even
in anthropology, whence it originates" (Gamble & Gibson, 1999, p.219).
Organizational researchers have provided a plethora of definitions and paradigms
with which to examine organizational culture (Frost, Moore, Louis, Lundberg
& Martin, 1991; Martin, 1992; Meyerson & Martin, 1987; Schein, 1990;
Witmer, 1997). Organizational culture, therefore, is conceptualized in this
investigation according to Schein (1990):
Culture can now be defined as (a) a pattern of basic assumptions, (b) invented,
discovered, or developed by a given group, (c) as it learns to cope with
its problems of external adaptation and internal investigation, (d) that
has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore (e) is to be
taught to new members as the (0 correct way to perceive, think, and feel
in relation to those problems. (p. 111)
Consequently, organizational culture is what a group learns over a period
of time, and such learning is simultaneously a cognitive, behavioral, and
affective process (Schein, 1990).
Previous research has linked an organization's culture with various organizational
behaviors experienced by its members. For example, Lindbo and Shultz (1998)
questioned the influence of an organization's culture in promoting the socialization
processes that facilitate an employee's retirement decisions. Witmer (1997)
explored the culture of Alcoholics Anonymous and applied structuration theory
in an effort to provide a fuller understanding of the ways in which organizations
are created and sustained through social interaction. Likewise, Gibson and
Papa (2000) conceptualized organizational osmosis as referring to an effortless
adoption of the ideas, values, and culture of an organization through preexisting
socialization experiences. Further, they discovered that anticipatory socialization
experiences and a common ideological grounding increased identification mechanisms
among work group members. They concluded that because newcomers strongly
identified with the values and goals of the organization, members submitted
themselves to mechanisms of control (i.e., concertive, unobtrusive control)
(Gibson & Papa, 2000).
Although previous research on organizational culture has relied primarily
on critical and/or interpretive approaches (e.g., Gibson & Papa, 2000;
Lindbo & Shultz, 1998; Witmer, 1997), Glaser, Zamanou, and Hacker (1987)
attempted to operationalize and measure the construct. These researchers
reviewed both management and communication research and identified six components
of organizational culture that are central to any construction of organizational
culture: teamwork, climate-morale, information flow, involvement, supervision,
and meetings. Moreover, Glaser, Zamanou, and Hacker (1987) argued that in
order for researchers to approach questions of whether organizational cultures
can be managed, or whether such cultures enhance or diminish organizational
performance, "a methodology must be developed for empirically establishing
what an organization's culture is [emphasis added by the authors] at a particular
point in time" (p. 175).
Given that researchers have identified the associations among organizational
culture and employee retention (Sheridan, 1992), person-organization fit
(O'Reilly, Chatman, & Caldwell, 1991), productivity (Kopelman, Brief,
& Guzzo, 1990), and executive decision-making (Gamble & Gibson, 1999),
organizational culture appears to permeate every facet of the organization.
As previously noted, Flamholtz (1995) suggested that at the apex of strategic
organizational development is the development of an appropriate organizational
culture within which management feels it can guide the organization. If concertive
control is developed and maintained through the process of identification
(Tompkins & Cheney, 1985), then the strategic development of an appropriate
culture may serve as the primary mechanism through which an organization
exercises unobtrusive control and attempts to develop identification in its
employees. Thus, the beliefs, values, and information communicated through
an organization's culture may indeed direct employee behavior indirectly
(Bullis & Tompkins, 1989).
RATIONALE
Based on their review of the organizational identification literature, Johnson,
Johnson, and Heimberg (1999) summarized three broad assertions posited by
organizational scholars. First, organizational identification is integrally
related to all of the social aspects of an organization. Second, organizational
identification is fundamental in an employee's decision-making premises and
third, the collective perceptions of an organization's members directs and
shapes the organization's communication in a way that sustains a collective
organizational identification Johnson et al., 1999). Based on the review
of literature and Johnson et al.'s (1999) assertions concerning organizational
identification, this investigation sought to identify those dimensions of
organizational culture most closely associated with employee perceptions
of organizational identification. Although some scholars have indicated that
a relationship may exist between organizational identification and an organization's
culture (e.g., Bullis & Tompkins, 1989), the influence of culture on
identification has yet to be examined empirically. Glaser, Zamanou, and Hacker
(1987) developed an empirical measurement of organizational culture based
on six, previously mentioned components of organizational culture that were
grounded in both management and communication research. Unfortunately, there
has been no direct attempt to assess the relationship between employee perceptions
of an organization's culture and employee levels of identification. To address
this void, a primary research question was advanced for consideration:
RQ1: What is the relationship between employee perceptions of organizational
culture (i.e., teamwork, morale, information flow, involvement, supervision,
and meetings) and employee perceptions of organizational identification?
As previously noted, Cheney and Tompkins (1987) asserted that identification
is as much a continuous process as it is a product. Given Bullis and Tompkins'
(1989) assertion that concertive control (i.e., strong culture) engenders
identification more implicitly, it was reasoned that employee perceptions
of an organization's culture would influence subsequent employee levels of
identification. Thus, an additional research question was advanced for consideration:
RQ2: How do employee perceptions of organizational culture (i.e., teamwork,
morale, information flow, involvement, supervision, and meetings) contribute
to employee perceptions of organizational identification?
METHOD
Sample
Participants were 76 employees from 31 different store locations of a large
retail sales organization located in a southwestern region of the United
States. The organization, deemed "SalesCo" hereafter, is the fifth largest
corporation in its industry with over 250 retail locations across the country.
Typically, a SalesCo retail location is staffed with a store sales manager,
two full-time sales professionals, and a part-time sales professional. In
this investigation, participants included 5 part-time sales professionals,
33 full-time sales professionals, 30 store sales managers, and 8 members
of upper management (i.e., Regional and District Sales Managers). Participants
also included 48 males and 28 females, ranging in age from 19 to 73 (3 provided
no data on age), with a mean age of 42.1. The ethnic backgrounds of participants
were as follows: 2.6% American Indian, 1.3% Asian, 6.6% African American,
6.6% Hispanic, and 82.9% white. Length of tenure for participants ranged
from 1 month to 6 years, with a mean tenure of 1 year, 10 months (SD = 1.5
years).
Procedure
Permission was obtained from SalesCo management to conduct the survey. From
a research standpoint, it is important that the author's familiarity with
this organization be explicated. The author was a former employee of SalesCo
prior to entering graduate school, and he maintained relationships with three
managers of SalesCo after leaving the organization. These relationships provided
access to gather data from SalesCo employees in four different districts.
Since SalesCo policy prohibits the release of employee information to outside
parties, surveys were mailed to district meetings and administered by district
sales managers. District sales managers were instructed to maintain confidentiality
and to reassure employees of the anonymity of their responses. A cover letter,
briefing the employees and requesting their permission, was attached to a
survey containing the measurements. The employees completed the questionnaires
anonymously and returned them to the researcher. Of the 81 employees currently
working within one of the four targeted SalesCo districts, 3 declined participation
and 2 questionnaires were returned incomplete. Thus, 76 employee questionnaires
were included in the statistical analysis, producing a response rate of 93.8%
for those four districts.
Measures
Organizational identification. Organizational identification was operationalized
using Cheney's (1983a) Organizational Identification Questionnaire (OIQ).
The OIQ consists of 25 Likert-type items designed to measure an employee's
level of identification with the organization across three dimensions: membership
(e.g., "I am proud to be an employee of SalesCo"), loyalty (e.g., "I would
be quite willing to spend the rest of my career with SalesCo"), and similarity
(e.g., "In general, I view SalesCo's problems as my problems"). Responses
were solicited using a seven point scale ranging from "agree very strongly"
(YES!) to "disagree very strongly" (NO!).
Although the OIQ has demonstrated strong reliability, with previously reported
alpha coefficients ranging from .90 to .94 (Bullis & Bach, 1991; Bullis
& Tompkins, 1989; Myers & Kassing, 1998), Miller et al. (2000) did
in fact call for a moratorium on its use. Thus, in order to extend, replicate,
and test the validity of the OIQ for this investigation, a confirmatory factor
analysis (CFA) was conducted to verify the factor structure, the unidimensionality,
and the internal consistency of the OIQ As Miller et al. (2000) noted, a
CFA indicates a prior theoretical assumption on the part of the researcher
and seeks to test whether the predicted model accurately represents the dimensionality
in the data. Moreover, CFAs do not assume equal quality among the items on
a factor structure; the items must pass the tests of item loading and internal
consistency. To test the unidimensionality and internal consistency of the
OIQ Hamilton and Hunter's (1987) PACKAGE program was employed.
In the first test of the OIQ factor structure, analyses of item loadings
indicated that each of the 25 OIQ items loaded highest on the Organizational
Identification factor; 20 of the 25 items loaded at .60 or higher (see Table
1). The second test of the factor structure - internal consistency - revealed
that only 2% of the discrepancies between the predicted and observed correlations
were greater than the confidence interval (obtained using a .05 level of
significance). Since the number of individual discrepancies falling outside
of the confidence interval should be less than 5% (Miller et al., 2000),
the results were consistent with the hypothesized unidimensional structure
of the scale. Finally, an overall test for internal consistency using a chi-square
estimation showed that across the matrix, the sum of squared errors was nonsignificant,
chi^sup 2^ (299) = 102.05, p > .05. Thus, the CFA analysis confirmed that
the OIQ was both unidimensional and internally consistent. The mean, standard
deviation, and alpha reliability for the OIQ are reported in Table 2.
Organizational culture. Organizational culture was operationalized using
Glaser, Zamanou, and Hacker's (1987) Organizational Culture Survey (OCS).
The OCS, as reported by Rubin, Palmgreen, and Sypher (1994), is composed
of 36 Likert-type items designed to measure an employee's perceptions of
an organization's culture across 6 dimensions: teamwork, morale, information
flow, involvement, supervision, and meetings. Employee responses were solicited
using a five-point scale ranging from (1) "to a very little extent" to (5)
"to a very great extent."
[IMAGE TABLE] Captioned as: TABLE 1
[IMAGE TABLE] Captioned as: TABLE 2
Whereas the OIQ measures an employee's sense of ownership with the organization
(e.g., "We at SalesCo are different from others in our field," or "In general,
I view SalesCo's problems as my own"), the OCS asks employees to treat the
organization as a separate entity and to evaluate six dimensions of the organization's
culture (e.g., "This organization respects its workers," "This organization
values the ideas of workers at every level," "When changes are made the reasons
why are made clear," etc.). Since relatively few investigations have used
the OCS, a second CFA was conducted to verify the factor structure, dimensionality,
and internal consistency of each of the six sub-scales of the OCS. Finally,
the OCS's construct validity compared to the OIQ was measured by Hunter's
(1980) test of parallelism.
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DISCUSSION
Organizational identification is both a process and a product that facilitates
unobtrusive control in an organization (Tompkins & Cheney, 1985). The
results from this investigation indicated that although certain dimensions
of organizational culture are related to organizational identification in
employees, organizational morale may be the most important dimension. Cheney
(1983a) suggested that organizations exercise unobtrusive control by communicating
their values, goals, and information in the form of decisional premises.
Although not directly related to decisional premises, this study extends
existing research on Tompkins and Cheney's (1985) theory of unobtrusive control
and raises interesting questions for organizational scholars attempting to
operationalize constructs such as organizational identification and organizational
culture. At the very least, the results tend to suggest that a meaningful
relationship exists between employees' perceptions of an organization's morale
and employee levels of organizational identification.
The initial research question explored the associations among six dimensions
of organizational culture (i.e., teamwork, morale, information flow, involvement,
supervision, and meetings) and organizational identification. Results suggested
that each dimension maintained a positive, significant relationship with
organizational identification. Moreover, employee perceptions of morale,
information flow, involvement, and meetings were more closely associated
with organizational identification than perceptions of teamwork and supervision
(see Table 2). These results extend organizational research that has linked
organizational identification with various socially constructed components
of the organization, such as multiplex network relationships (e.g., Bullis
& Bach, 1991) and supervisor-subordinate relationships (e.g., Myers &
Kassing, 1998). Consequently, these findings are meaningful given both the
importance of an appropriate organizational culture (i.e., Flamholtz, 1995),
and Barker and Tompkins' (1994) assertion that organizations are demanding
higher levels of worker identification. Indeed, efforts to improve the more
tangible components of the organization's culture (i.e., information flow,
supervision, meetings, etc.) may enable management to exercise higher levels
of unobtrusive control and direct employee behavior indirectly (e.g., Bullis
& Tompkins, 1989).
The results from the second research question suggested that employee perceptions
of morale, when combined with the other five dimensions of organizational
culture, was the only significant predictor of employee perceptions of organizational
identification, accounting for 56% of the shared variance. Although Myers
and Kassing's (1998) contentions concerning supervisor communication behaviors
and organizational identification were supported, this study revealed that
organizational morale was considerably more meaningful in predicting organizational
identification than supervision. An employee's perceptions of how an organization
treats its members are fairly significant given its influence on employee
identification. Although the associations among the six dimensions of the
OCS and the OIQ ranged from small (e.g., r = .35 for supervision) to large
(e.g., r = .74 for morale), organizational morale emerged as the only significant
predictor of organizational identification. Given that each of the confirmatory
factor analyses conducted in this investigation confirmed the dimensional
structures and internal consistencies of both the OIQ and the OCS, it appears
likely that organizational morale accounts for most, if not all of the shared
variance in organizational identification. In other words, employee perceptions
of teamwork, information flow, involvement, supervision, and meetings fail
to account for any additional shared variance in employee levels of identification
beyond that accounted for by employee morale.
The fact that organizational morale emerged as the only significant predictor
of organizational identification may provide meaningful insights into the
processes by which organizations can exert unobtrusive, concertive control.
The OCS morale sub-scale measured an employee's perceptions of the relationship
between the organization and its labor force (see Table 3). Based on these
results, SalesCo employees identified most with the organization when they
perceived an atmosphere of trust and respect within the organization. Moreover,
employees reported higher levels of identification when the organization
served as a source of motivation. In spite of previous research identifying
a multitude of organizational factors related to identification (e.g., Bullis
& Bach, 1989, 1991; Myers & Kassing, 1998), management may find that
unobtrusive control is simply a by-product of how the employee feels about
the organization at any given moment. If the identification process is often
facilitated through a subtle and systematic manipulation of the rhetorical
environment (Myers & Kassing, 1998), then perhaps organizational efforts
designed to facilitate concertive control should focus upon communicating
an image of trust and respect between labor and management. This, in turn,
may place the organization in a position to motivate its employees and engender
higher levels of identification.
Although not considered a primary purpose of this investigation, the replication
and extension of Miller et al.'s (2000) analysis of the OIQ raises some interesting
questions concerning the affective commitment interpretation of the OIQ The
results of the confirmatory factor analysis yielded a 20-item scale, and
at face value, several of the items represented verbal behaviors on behalf
of the organization (e.g., "I talk up SalesCo to my friends as a great company
to work for," "I often describe myself to others by saying 'I work for SalesCo'
or 'I am from SalesCo"'). More importantly, the 20-item factor structure
included items directly related to Tompkins and Cheney's (1985) theory of
unobtrusive control (e.g., "I try to make on-the-job decisions by considering
the consequences of my actions for SalesCo," and "I find it easy to identify
myself with SalesCo"). In fact, one could even point to the size and strength
of the relationship between organizational morale and identification as evidence
in support of Miller et al.'s (2000) contention that the OIQ measures affective
commitment. At the very least, organizational scholars should continue to
pursue a "more robust operationalization of the organizational identification
construct" (Miller et al., 2000, p. 654) that captures the behavioral, as
well as affective, dimensions of identification.
Despite the researcher's attempt to explore organizational identification
and culture empirically, there were obvious limitations worth noting. Again,
this study used a small sample size from one organization. Although the perceptions
of organizational members currently employed outside of academia were measured,
a sample size of 76 employees limits the generalizability of the results;
the findings represent to some extent a case study. Soliciting a greater
number of respondents from several different organizations may provide an
even better opportunity to explore the replicability and validity of the
dimensional structures of both the OIQ and the OCS. Thus, future research
that explores the relationship between employee levels of identification
and employee perceptions of culture across multiple organizations is clearly
needed.
A second limitation may be the use of a quantitative measurement of organizational
culture. For logistic and pragmatic reasons, organizational culture was conceptualized
and operationalized in this investigation as a unified, tangible phenomenon.
Martin (1992) has argued, however, that a greater understanding of an organization's
culture emerges when the researcher approaches the culture from multiple
perspectives rather than any single perspective. Replication and extension
of this research through interpretive means would be beneficial and perhaps
provide a greater understanding of the relationship between an organization's
rituals, stories, and myths and an employee's perceptions of identification.
Finally, future research should expand upon the conceptual foundation tested
in this study and explore other dimensions of organizational culture that
may influence organizational identification. For example, Gibson and Papa
(2000) described the process of organizational osmosis, whereby potential
employees experienced an effortless adoption of the ideas, values, and culture
of the organization through preexisting socialization experiences. Perhaps
employee identification forms prior to organizational entry and simply changes
as the employee is socialized into the organization. Thus, future research
that explores the influence of an organization's culture on the process of
employee identification across time may prove to be beneficial to management,
organizational scholars, and practitioners alike.
Essentially, this investigation provided a specific component of an organization's
culture that helps define how identification and unobtrusive control function
within the communication environment created and enacted by an organization's
members. More importantly, it extended an existing critique of the OIQ and
provided some initial evidence of internal consistency and construct validity
for the OCS. Finally, the results informed our understanding of Tompkins
and Cheney's (1985) theory of unobtrusive control in organizations, and it
supported previous research that has linked organizational identification
with supervision (Myers & Kassing, 1998), teamwork (Barker & Tompkins,
1994), and network involvement (Bullis & Bach, 1991). Based on the results
of this investigation, the relationship between organizational identification
and organizational culture appears to be a fairly significant phenomenon
given the prevalence and importance of unobtrusive, concertive control in
modern organizations.
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Paul Schrodt (M.A., University of North Texas, 2000) is a doctoral student
at the University of NebraskaLincoln. The author would like to extend his
appreciation to Mike Allen - Editor, four anonymous reviewers, Kathleen j
Krone and Dawn 0. Braithwaite of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Jayne
Morgan of the University of Northern Iowa and Katherine Miller of Texas A&M
University for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. A previous
version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Central
States Communication Association in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Communication Studies
West Lafayette
Summer 2002
Authors:
Paul Schrodt
Volume:
53
Issue:
2
Pagination:
189-202
ISSN:
10510974
Subject Terms:
Organizational behavior; Employee attitude; Retail sales
