The downside of organizational identification: Relations between identification, workaholism and well-being

Abstract

Employee organizational identification has been proposed and found to be positively related to employee health and well-being. The empirical evidence, however, is not unequivocal, and some authors have suggested possible downsides of identification with the organization as a whole or with a group within it. The potential negative effect of over-identification was tested empirically for the first time in the present paper. Two studies were conducted; Study 1 was cross-sectional and used a sample of Italian law court clerks (N=195) and Study 2 was longitudinal and employed a sample of Italian teachers (N=140 at T2). We proposed a curvilinear mediation model with identification curvilinearly predicting workaholism, and workaholism, in turn, negatively affecting employee well-being. This curvilinear link between organizational identification and workaholism means that workaholism at first decreases with growing identification, but when identification becomes too strong, workaholism increases. The results confirmed our hypotheses, and we discuss theoretical and practical implications.

Keywords:

• identification
• social identity
• workaholism
• health
• well-being
• work-related stress

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Andrew Hayes for his help with the analyses. Study 2 was supported by a grant from IPRASE (Istituto Provinciale per la Ricerca e la Sperimentazione Educativa) di Trento (TN) – Italy.

Notes

Lorenzo Avanzi and Rolf van Dick contributed equally to this article.