Employer reviews may say as much about the employee as they do the employer: online disclosures, organizational attachments, and unethical behavior

ABSTRACT

Do reviews on organizational review websites (e.g., Indeed.com, GlassDoor.com) speak to the employer or the employee? This study tests the structural relationship between cognitive and affective organizational attachments and three outcomes: willingness to disclose one’s workplace online, unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB), and workplace reviews. Using a national sample of U.S. workers (N = 304), we examine how organizational identification and commitment relate to publicly posting about one’s organization. Self-presentation and organizational attachment are used to hypothesize how individuals selectively self-present organizational identities online. Structural equation modeling shows identification and commitment both positively relate to review ratings. While identification positively predicts online disclosure and UPB, commitment is unrelated to disclosure and has a buffering effect whereby it negatively predicts UPB and interacts with UPB to predict organizational review ratings. Findings illustrate that online reviews and disclosures of one's workplace may say as much about the worker as the workplace itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Online self-presentation
• organizational reviews
• organizational commitment
• organizational identification
• unethical pro-organizational behavior

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the editors, reviewers, and Greta Underhill for their helpful comments on drafts of this manuscript. A case-study, based on this data and co-authored by Underhill and Piercy, will be available in Liberman and Wright’s forthcoming Casing Mediated Communication (Kendall Hunt).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We purposefully asked about where people ‘would OR do’ share information about their workplace online to emphasize both back stage preparation and front stage performance of selective self-presentation. However, in a different portion of the survey we also asked participants where they currently disclosed their workplace (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, ‘Don’t disclose’). This measure correlated highly with the self-presentational measure we report here (R = .61). When this alternative variable is used in the structural model, the results are significant and in the same direction. This demonstrates the robustness of our findings, but we opt for the willingness (rather than actual) disclosure to be consistent with our theoretical framework.

2 The correlation between commitment and UPB is positive (see Table 1). However, the structural relationship between commitment and UPB is negative. This is commonly called a suppression effect. In SEM the interpretation is that the combination of predictors differentially predicts the outcome construct. As Kline (2011) explains ‘The ‘surprising’ results … are due to controlling for other predictors’ in the structural framework (p. 26). In short, the structural model demonstrates a strong positive relationship between identification and UPB which is reduced by higher levels of commitment.