Ambivalent Identification Research Articles

The Role of Ambivalent Identification on Service Recovery: A Study of the Hotel Industry

Service failure is common and inevitable due to the unique characteristics of services. It is essential for service organizations to carefully handle service failure and employ effective recovery strategies to maintain and improve customer satisfaction, especially when consumers experience mixed emotions towards the organization. However, most service failure and recovery literature focuses on how ambivalent identification works at the organizational level. Thus, this study extends the application of the social identity theory beyond organizational perception and focuses specifically on the consumer context, shedding light on its role in recovery justice and satisfaction. It explores the impact of failure severity and degree of correction on recovery justice, with ambivalent identification serving as the moderator in the hotel industry context. Findings from an intercept survey method indicate that the negative relationship between severity of failure and recovery justice weakens as ambivalent identification increases, while ambivalent identification strengthens the positive relationship between degree of correction and recovery justice. Moreover, ambivalent identification diminishes the positive impact of recovery justice on post-recovery satisfaction. This study provides the theoretical and practical implications related to service recovery for hotel management.

Ambivalent identification mediates the relationship between organizational justice and stress.

The present study aims to examine the relationship between organizational justice and employee stress through the lenses of social identity theory and the ambivalent identification process. The research hypotheses assume that employees working in organizational environments with low levels of justice could experience more stress, and this relationship is also mediated by ambivalent identification. In other words, the mediating mechanism of this relation posited that low levels of organizational justice were associated with high levels of ambivalent identification, which in turn increased levels of work-related stress. Across a field study in several organizations from healthcare sectors, results confirmed that employees treated with less fairness experienced high ambivalence toward their organization, which increased their perception of stress, i.e., work-related burnout, client-related burnout, physical symptoms, and interpersonal strain at work. Furthermore, results supported only a full mediation model, in which the direct relationship between organizational justice and stress was not significant. The present results make an important contribution to the research literature on justice: the inclusion of the mediator variable, namely, ambivalent identification, drops the expected direct effect of organizational justice on stress, suggesting a call for action in adopting the social identity perspective in addition to organizational justice models, and specifically introducing the study of a detrimental form of identification, such as ambivalent identification. Limitations and practical implications of the study were discussed.

Do sectors (still) matter? Exploring similarities and differences between public, private, and non‐profit organizations from an organizational identity perspective

AbstractThis paper uses an organizational identity perspective to investigate similarities and differences between public, private, and nonprofit organizations. The analysis is focused on three interrelated identity domains: the content used by members to define their organizations; the orientation of the organizational identity (individualistic, relational, and collectivistic); the nature of members' attachment to their organizations (identification, neutral identification, ambivalent identification, disidentification). Using a sample of 256 members of organizations belonging to these three sectors we found that: the content used to describe public, private, and nonprofit organizations, although sharing numerous elements, also contains sector‐specific meanings, especially in nonprofit organizations; concerning the organizational identity orientation, private organizations are seen as more individualistic and more relational than public and nonprofit ones, while public organizations score high in the collectivistic orientation; regarding the nature of members' attachment, although members of the three types of organizations exhibit the same levels of organizational identification and neutral identification, nonprofit organizations generate more disidentification and ambivalent identification among their members than public and private ones. Overall, organizational elements revealing operational practices tend to be similar, while those elements representing organizational identity tend to be different.

Stretch Goals and Unethical Behavior: Role of Ambivalent Identification and Competitive Psychological Climate: The Case of Real Estate Industry in Lipa, Batangas

Stretch Goals and Unethical Behavior: Role of Ambivalent Identification and Competitive Psychological Climate: The Case of Real Estate Industry in Lipa, Batangas

The Mediating Role of Organizational Synergy in the Effect of Ambivalent Identification on Cognitive Flexibility

Bu çalışmada örgüt üyelerinin örgütle ilgili bilişsel ve duygusal konularda kararsızlık içinde olma durumlarının örgütsel sinerji aracılığıyla alternatifler arasında karar verebilen ve kontrolü elinde tutan bireylere dönüşüp dönüşmediği araştırılmaktadır. Bu bağlamda örgütsel sinerjinin alt boyutları olan etkileşim ve takdir etme, bütünleşme, strateji ve güncellenme ve güçlenme değişkenlerinin örgüt içindeki kararsız bireyleri daha kararlı ve kontrollü bir yapıya ulaştırmada aracı değişkenler olarak ne derecede etkilediği araştırmanın odak noktasını oluşturmaktadır. Bu odak noktası doğrultusunda 20-50 yaş aralığında, 92’si kadın ve 155’i erkek lojistik sektörü işletme çalışanlarından veri toplanmıştır. Yapılan analizler sonucunda kararsız özdeşleşmenin bilişsel ve duygusal boyutlarının bilişsel esnekliğe etkisinde örgütsel sinerjinin aracı değişkenlerinin farklı düzeylerde anlamlı etkisinin olduğu görülmüştür. Bulguların alanyazına katkı sağlayıcı nitelikte sonuçlar içerdiği düşünülmekte olup konuyla ilgili bundan sonraki çalışmalara ışık tutabileceği öngörülmektedir.

On the Meme Train to Sylt: Memetic Becoming and Ambivalent Identification Online

In June 2022, the German government implemented a transit policy offering travelers an unlimited ticket to ride the country’s regional train system all summer long for a mere 9€. Conservative pundits and commentators decried the policy, worrying that the rabble would use their 9€ tickets to overwhelm posh tourist destinations like the island of Sylt in the North of Germany. An overwhelming invasion never materialized, but a fair share of raucous punks did set up shop in Sylt’s public squares in the days after the ticket became available. Just as significant as the physical “invasion” of Sylt were the flurry of memes produced surrounding the Sylt controversy. Through memes, social media participants simultaneously mocked conservative worry about Sylt and punk presence on Sylt. All this memetic play inspired participants to become. Through a mix of identification and disidentification, memes hailed participants into political stances characterized by specific modes of expression. Sylt memery was lulzy, agonistic, and ephemeral. In other words, it was indicative of the broader ambivalence that characterizes public participation inflected by the internet culture. The Sylt story therefore holds lessons about the potentials and pitfalls of collective expression on social media. Memetic becoming, at best, can help people speak truth to power. At worst, it can inspire only a nihilistic smirk as the pixels speed across the screen.

Symmetry, Violence, and The Handmaiden's Queer Colonial Intimacies

Abstract The Japanese annexation of Korea (1910–45) implicates a crisis of representation in South Korean national history. Both the traumatic wounds and complex intimacies of Japan's rule over its Korean subjects were met with postcolonial suppression, censorship, and disavowal. This article examines Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi, South Korea, 2016), a period film set in 1930s Korea under Japanese rule, in relation to the two nations’ fraught but interconnected colonial and postcolonial histories. By analyzing the film's explicit sexual depiction through discourses of ethnicity, gender, and nation, it argues that the lesbian sex scenes encode and eroticize latent anxieties and tensions surrounding Japan-Korea relations, making explicit the ambivalent longing and lingering identification shared between the colonizers and the colonized. Furthermore, through intertextual reference to the intertwined and imitative relations between the national cinemas of Japan and Korea—relations mediated and elided by a long history of state censorship—Park's film repudiates an essentialist South Korean identity propped up by both nationalist narratives and market liberalization policies. Through palimpsestic projection of the colonial era onto South Korea's neoliberal present, the film invites parallels between colonialism's unresolved legacy and contemporary modes of cultural production. Simultaneously, the film offers a utopian vision of a national self that surfaces—rather than suppresses—the violence and pleasure incurred in confrontations with the colonial or transnational other.

Exploring the role of India’s secondary school compulsory curriculum textbooks in students’ national identity constructions in an overseas school

This study problematises the contribution of India’s school textbooks in students’ national identity constructions in an overseas school in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The textbooks construct students’ national identity on the concepts of India’s secular democracy, colonial resistance and equal citizenship rights. Notwithstanding study participants’ ambivalent identification with these ideals, they mostly express confusing identities evincing religious tendencies, gendered beliefs towards women and antipathy for India’s neighbouring states. This entails implications for India’s national cohesion and students’ ability to live in harmony with other communities in the diasporic setting. It also poses risks to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 2030.

Stretch goals and unethical behavior: role of ambivalent identification and competitive psychological climate

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the effect of stretch goals on unethical behavior and explore the mediating role of ambivalent identification and moderating role of competitive psychological climate.Design/methodology/approachA total of 350 MBA students from Northwestern China completed the two-phase survey. The bootstrapping analysis outlined by Hayes was used to assess a moderated mediation model.FindingsThis study found that stretch goals could trigger employees' unethical behavior via ambivalent identification. Competitive psychological climate intensified the relationship between stretch goals and ambivalent identification. Moreover, such a climate aggravated the indirect effect of stretch goals on unethical behavior via ambivalent identification.Practical implicationsOrganizations and managers should use stretch goals prudently and implement measures to reduce the ethical cost.Originality/valueThis study provides unique contributions by identifying ambivalent identification as an important mediator and competitive psychological climate as a boundary condition of stretch goals' disruptive effect on unethical behavior.

José Clemente Orozco’s Dancing Indians: Performing Mexicanness for the Trans-American Market

José Clemente Orozco’s 1935 lithograph depicting drunken and dancing “Indians” in a Mexican plaza is analyzed through the lens of performance studies as a theatrical scenario that restages colonial encounter for the trans-American tourist market. Comparisons are drawn with colonial documents, period representations of folk celebrations, satirical print culture, and contemporary performance art. The vernacular humor and vicious stereotype evident in the print are characterized as a structure of feeling that captures the ambivalent identification with alterity that characterizes Mexico’s postrevolutionary national project and the pressure on artists to perform Mexicanness for the US American collecting class.

Treading Water, Hoarding Swims

ABSTRACT This auto-ethnographic essay explores the author’s ambivalent identifications as an academic researcher trying to write about swimming. Beginning with her tide-bound rituals of sea swimming near her home in Merseyside, the author reflects upon her shifting perceptions of her own physical and psychic interiority in the wake of her cancer diagnosis in June 2019. By drawing together forms of mobility associated with swimming, collecting and hoarding, the author seeks out some unlikely connections: through the trope of ‘treading water’, she represents states of immersion and suspended temporality, and she describes how – both as a swimmer and a hoarder – she experiences a heightened sense of permeable interiority, an ebb and flow of feeling between self and environment.

Sympathetic subsumption: A defense against anxiety and aggression in groups

In the following paper, the author offers a name (“sympathetic subsumption”) and a psychoanalytic and socio-analytic explanation for the process by which a victimizing individual or group re-directs sympathy toward itself, even as it victimizes an other or others. In most cases, sympathetic subsumption involves ambivalent identifications with and tenuous idealizations of past and present victims and victimizers. The result of sympathetic subsumption is the displacement of sympathy for manifest victims, allowing acts of victimization to occur with diminished emotional resistance. Thus, individuals and groups make use of sympathetic subsumption to facilitate attacks upon others and to avoid conscious confrontation with real anxieties and terrors that arise in group settings.

Do Customer Discounts Affect Frontline Employees?

Customer discounts continue to be one of the most central promotional tools. While discounts effectively serve important corporate objectives, they may also exhibit additional unanticipated effects on internal stakeholders involved in the value creation process. This research examines the impact of customer discounts on frontline service employees. One experimental study and two field investigations are presented. The findings underline that customer discounts made salient by their redemption, frequency, and depth (i.e., magnitude) reduce frontline employees’ experienced task significance as well as their perceived appreciation by the firm. Discounts also exert destructive indirect effects on frontline employees’ workplace responses including their intrinsic motivation, ambivalent identification, and turnover intentions as mediated by task significance and appreciation. These indirect effects are for the most part driven by perceived appreciation, serving as a key mechanism in employees’ cognitive processing of customer discounts. The present findings provide first evidence that customer discounts can provoke undesired effects upon firms’ service workforce in tandem with fulfilling promotional objectives and stimulate the need for a better coordination between firms’ service and promotional activities.

Ambivalent Identification as a Moderator of the Link Between Organizational Identification and Counterproductive Work Behaviors

Although counterproductive work behaviors can be extremely damaging to organizations and society as a whole, we do not yet fully understand the link between employees’ organizational attachment and their intention to engage in such behaviors. Based on social identity theory, we predicted a negative relationship between organizational identification and counterproductive work behaviors. We also predicted that this relationship would be moderated by ambivalent identification. We explored counterproductive work behaviors toward the organization (CWB-O) and other individuals (CWB-I). Study 1, a survey of 198 employees, revealed that employees who identified strongly with their organization reported lower levels of CWB-O, but as predicted, only when ambivalent identification was low. Study 2 involved a manipulation in the form of a scenario presented to 228 U.S. employees, generally replicated the findings of Study 1: the link between organizational identification and CWB-O was stronger for participants in the low ambivalence condition than for those in the high ambivalence condition. The interaction effect of ambivalent and organizational identification on CWB-I was only marginally significant in the second study. These findings provide new evidence for the positive influence of organizational identification under conditions of low ambivalence on counterproductive behaviors toward an organization.

Identity and stress: an application of the expanded model of organisational identification in predicting strain at work

ABSTRACTWe contribute to the understanding of the relationship between organisational identification and work-related stress by examining the role that expanded forms of organisational identification play in explaining the nature of this relationship. The current study explores the extent to which organisational identification and other expanded forms of identification predict employee strain. We hypothesise that ambivalent identification, neutral identification, and disidentification will moderate the negative relationship between organisational identification and exhaustion and ego depletion, such that the link between identification and strain will be stronger when the other dimensions are low. We tested these predictions in a survey among 228 employees of care homes for the elderly (72% social-sanitary operators, 27% nurses). Results largely supported the hypotheses and show reliable interactions for ambivalent, neutral identification, and disidentification on both exhaustion and ego depletion. Results showed a significant moderation by ambivalent identification for exhaustion but not for ego depletion. We discuss limitations and future implications for research and practice of the expanded model of organisational identification in organisational interventions that deal with work-related stress.

How Ambivalent Identification with the Vatican Influences Church Members’ Involvement Behaviors

Due to recent scandals, members of the Roman Catholic Church may find themselves torn between a cherished faith and inadequate actions taken by Church hierarchy developing an ambivalent identification towards this hierarchy, as exemplified by the Vatican. At the same time, they may continue to positively identify with other foci of the Church, for instance their local parishes, with which they have a sense of familiarity, and the very well regarded leader, Pope Francis. We examine how ambivalent identification with the Vatican may associate with members’ involvement behaviors (e.g., praying, evangelizing, and monetary contributions) when they positively identify with their parish and Pope Francis. Based on a survey of church members (N=445), we found that ambivalent identification with the Vatican has a positive association with two of the involvement behaviors (praying, evangelizing) when identification with the parish is high. In contrast, and contrary to what we hypothesized, the association of ambivalent identification with the Vatican with these behaviors (praying, evangelizing) is negative when identification with the Pope is high. Our results shed light on how members may respond to ambivalent identification with one target, when they positively identify with the other, and emphasize the importance of understanding members’ identification with other targets in shaping the relationship between ambivalent identification and involvement behaviors.

I Am and I Am Not: Ambivalence in Entrepreneur Identification

Research on entrepreneur identity has focused on understanding how and when individuals see themselves as an entrepreneur and scholars have argued that individuals either clearly identify with the term ‘entrepreneur’ or they disidentify with it. However, the literature hints at instances of ambivalent identification, i.e., when individuals may identify with certain facets of the term and disidentify with others. Using qualitative data from 29 founders of businesses across the United States, Canada, and Australia, we delve deeper into this phenomenon and find that individuals are ambivalent not only with reference to their identity as an entrepreneur but also as to how they want others to perceive them, i.e., their image. We develop a two-stage model of entrepreneur ambivalence that captures these findings and illustrates the reasons why individuals may identify, disidentify, or ambivalently identify with the term ‘entrepreneur’ and what leads them to project an image that is either in sync with or misaligned with their identity as an entrepreneur. Our findings have important theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurs and agencies focused on supporting and encouraging them.

Navigating Ambivalence: Perceived Organizational Prestige–Support Discrepancy and Its Relation to Employee Cynicism and Silence

AbstractDrawing on the social identity literature, this study offers theoretical arguments and empirical evidence to understand reactions to divergent perceptions of organizational external prestige (PEP) and organizational support (POS) – two crucial bases of employees’ social worth. Across three studies, using both experimental and field data, we find that PEP‐POS discrepancy contributes to employees’ perceptions of organizational cynicism and silence behaviour, especially when PEP is high and POS is low (rather than the reverse). Consistent with our social identity perspective, we find that ambivalent identification, that is, the simultaneous identification and disidentification of an individual with an organization, is a key mediating mechanism that transfers the interactive relationship of PEP and POS to cynicism and silence. These findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of individuals’ social worth at work.

Long-term Dynamics of Employee Identification with an Organizational Unit

<p>This study presents the first framework for understanding the long-term dynamics of employee identification with an organizational unit. Similar research generally adopts cross-sectional quantitative methods that insufficiently explain the long-term dynamics of identification. Following studies that find stronger identification with lower-level groups than with an entire organization, we examine the case of a marine hull unit of a Japanese property-casualty insurer. We suggest that employees initially identify with the unit because of “occupational ability recognition” and “affective recognition”. We identify that these factors are necessary and sufficient conditions for identification with the unit. When they are absent, dis-identification occurs. If identification based on these factors is maintained, “value preferences” become dimensions of identification. Members prefer the unit values of interesting work, professional utility, and career attainment. When employees are dissatisfied with the unit’s values, ambivalent identification occurs. Ultimately, mature employees may express a “value proposition orientation”. They identify with the unit by consciously relating their value proposition and the unit.<strong></strong></p>

Mixed feelings, mixed blessing? How ambivalence in organizational identification relates to employees’ regulatory focus and citizenship behaviors

Recent conceptual work suggests that the sense of identity that employees develop vis-a-vis their organization goes beyond the traditional notion of organizational identification and can also involve conflicting impulses represented by ambivalent identification. In this study, we seek to advance this perspective on identification by proposing and empirically examining important antecedents and consequences. In line with our hypotheses, an experimental study ( N = 199 employees) shows that organizational identification and ambivalent identification interactively influence employees’ willingness to engage in organizational citizenship behavior. The effect of organizational identification on organizational citizenship behavior is significantly reduced when employees experience ambivalent identification. A field study involving employees from a broad spectrum of organizations and industries ( N = 564) replicated these findings. Moreover, results show that employees’ promotion and prevention focus form differential relationships with organizational identification and ambivalent identification, providing first evidence for a link between employees’ regulatory focus and the dynamics of identification. Implications for the expanded model of organizational identification and the understanding of ambivalence in organizations are discussed.