Antecedents of organizational identification in multinational corporations: fostering psychological attachment to the local subsidiary and the global organization

Abstract

This article reports the results of an empirical case study of the antecedents of organizational identification among local managers in a multinational corporation (MNC). Organizational identification, which refers to an individual's psychological attachment to the organization, has gained increasing attention because of its assumed link with behaviour associated with enhanced organizational performance. Yet little work has been done on what fosters organizational identification, particularly within the context of a MNC. Moreover, there is empirical evidence showing that managerial employees of MNCs draw a distinction between their local subsidiary and the global organization as manifest in separate group identifications. This suggests that there may be differential sets of antecedents of identification with the local subsidiary and with the global organization. The results of the present study indicate that there are different sets of factors that promote identification with the local and global levels of the organization. The results further show a complementarity of causal variables; identification with the local subsidiary is fostered primarily by factors which pertain to the local company context, while identification with the global organization is fostered primarily by factors which pertain to the MNC as a global entity.