Motivation and Justice at Work: The Role of Emotion and Cognition Components of Personal and Collective Work Identity.

Ola Nordhall,Igor Knez

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02307

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of personal and collective work identity (including emotion and cognition components), in predicting work motivation (operationalized as work self-determined motivation) and organizational justice (operationalized as organizational pay justice). Digitized questionnaires were distributed by e-mail to 2905 members, teachers, of a Swedish trade union. A total of 768 individuals answered the questionnaire and by that participated in this study. Personal- compared to collective work identity was shown to positively associate with self-determined motivation accounted for by the emotion component of personal work identity. Collective compared to personal work identity was reported to positively associate with organizational pay justice accounted for by the cognition component of collective work identity. All this suggests that both work-related motivation and organizational justice might be, to some extent, accounted for by the psychological mechanisms of work identity and that, as predicted, different types of work identity, play different significant roles in predicting motivation and justice at work. More precisely, the emotion component of work identity was more pronounced in personal work-bonding relationships, and the cognitive component, of work identity in contrast, was more pronounced in collective work-bonding relationships.

Highlights

Work identity can be divided into personal and collective identity, in general terms, involving two different foci of identification that differently associate with a wide range of work- and organizational behaviors, norms and attitudes (Riketta, 2005; Riketta and Van Dick, 2005; Lee et al, 2015)
More precisely and concerning Hypotheses 1 and 2, it was shown that personal compared to collective work identity positively associated with work self-determined motivation, accounted for by the emotion component of personal work identity
The present results are in accordance with findings that collective identity is neither positively nor negatively associated with satisfaction of personal motivators and needs, i.e., factors specific to the individual employee (Haslam et al, 2000), for example that collective identity is not associated with individual internal motivation

Summary

Introduction

Work identity can be divided into personal and collective identity, in general terms, involving two different foci of identification (van Knippenberg and van Schie, 2000; Millward and Haslam, 2013) that differently associate with a wide range of work- and organizational behaviors, norms and attitudes (Riketta, 2005; Riketta and Van Dick, 2005; Lee et al, 2015). A further construct of great magnitude within the context of occupational work is organizational justice It involves processes of perceived fairness and different types of interactions

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion