Organizational identification: Development and testing of a conceptually grounded measure

Abstract

There is continuing debate in the literature as to how organizational identification (OID) should be conceptualized and operationalized. We present a new six-item measure of OID that includes both cognitive and affective components and that integrates the main dimensions of OID found in the literature. The new measure comprises three main subcomponents: self-categorization and labelling, sharing of organizational goals and values, and a sense of organizational belonging and membership. The measure was tested on two separate samples of over 600 employees working in the UK National Health Service (NHS) using Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results provided support for the proposed three-component conceptualization of OID. However, the three subcomponents were highly intercorrelated and showed low discriminant validity. We therefore propose a single overall measure of OID. This six-item aggregate scale has acceptable psychometric properties and provides a theoretically meaningful, but parsimonious, measure of OID for use in field research.