Organizational Identification

What it is

Mael and Ashforth wrote at a time when organisations were interested in identification but had no agreed way to measure it. Their paper, Alumni and their alma mater: A partial test of the reformulated model of organizational identification, set out a model and tested it with self-report surveys. The respondents were 297 alumni of a single college.

The model related identification to features of the organisation and to features of the member. On the organisation's side, alumni identified more strongly with a college they judged to be distinctive. On the member's side, identification went with satisfaction, with length of enrolment and with sentimentality. The paper also lists things that were not linked to identification in this sample: how recently a person attended, how many schools they had attended and whether they had a mentor.

In effect

The paper also tied identification to what alumni did. Those who identified more strongly were more likely to make donations, to advise others to attend the college and to take part in school events. These are the behaviours an organisation would count as support, and the study placed them on the same scale as the feeling.

Mael and Ashforth suggested two uses. Academic administrators could draw on the findings to increase alumni support, and managers in corporations could draw on them to think about the loyalty of workers during mergers and takeovers.

For readers of the group identification literature the paper is a starting point for measurement. It treats identification as a quantity that varies between people and relates to outcomes, which is the move that later multi-part models, such as the hierarchical multicomponent model of in-group identification, build on and divide into components.

What it does not say

The data came from one self-report survey of one college's alumni, so the results show which things travelled together and not which came first. A reader should not take them to show that satisfaction produces identification, or that identification produces donations.

The paper does not cover current employees, other kinds of organisation or other countries, and nothing on this page should be read as a finding about them. It also does not offer the separate components of identification that later work distinguishes.

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