How to Expand and Fill the Self in Organizations: The Role of Interpersonal Processes in the Employee Organizational Identity Construction

In the era of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA), the fluidity of organizations and the variability of individual work gradually replace the traditional stability and continuity. The question of how to connect employees and organizations has long intrigued researchers and practitioners. Employee organizational identity is the stable force that binds employees to organizations. Drawing on social identity theory, we argue the role of interpersonal processes in the employee organizational identity construction. We suggest that an employee’s relationship-building behaviors can promote employee organizational identity through the connected self. The indirect effect is stronger for employees who make more social comparisons because they are more sensitive to social influence. We collected data through questionnaires of 333 employees using a two-wave research design in China. The results indicate that an employee’s relationship-building behaviors enhance employee organizational identity. The connected self fully mediates the positive relationship between relationship-building and employee organizational identity. The outcomes also show that the positive effect of relationship-building toward connected self is intensified, when an employee engages in more social comparisons. The findings imply that interpersonal processes play an important role in the employee organizational identity construction. Then, the theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Organizational identity construction of the world’s top universities: A discourse analysis of university prospectuses

A prospectus, as a kind of self-description of the organization, is specified as one of the attributes of an organization. A university, as a type of organization, makes its prospectus accordingly. A prospectus – as a genre of organizational discourse – has a constructive mechanism. With the synergy of the discoursehistorical approach (DHA) and the corpus discourse approach, this article will analyze – using WordSmith – the discursive strategies involved in the construction of the organizational identity of the world’s top universities. The analysis reveals that the prospectuses of the world’s top 100 universities mainly employ the referential/nomination strategy and predication strategy to construct an identity for themselves as world-renowned, diversified, reputable leading universities which will participate positively in the global market.

Invoking Alphonse: The founder figure as a historical resource for organizational identity work

There has been growing interest in the rhetorical use of history to express organizational identity claims. Yet the evolving role of the founder figure in managerial accounts has not so far received specific attention. In this study, we examine how the founder figure is used to articulate, enact, stretch, preserve or refresh expressions of organizational identity, drawing on an 80-year magazine archive of a financial cooperative. We identify five modes of founder invocation, and show how distance from founding events leads to increasing abstraction in linkages between the founder and organizational identity claims. The paper offers a dynamic perspective on the mobilization of the founder in organizational identity construction as well as an understanding of how and why founders may remain established identity markers long after their demise.

‘Welcome to Twitter, @CIA. Better late than never’: Communication professionals’ views of social media humour and implications for organizational identity

Public authorities have traditionally used an official language style in public, but currently social media have become an outlet for humour. This article uses positioning analysis to discuss challenges that use of humour poses for the identity of public organizations. Drawing on interviews with communications professionals working in the emergency services sector, the article suggests six evaluative themes that factor into organizational identity construction, such as the frequency and type of humour in social media posts. Indeed, while humour helps fashion more flexible and risk-taking organizational identities, it can also stand contrary to a bureaucratic ethos of public servantship and equal treatment. Dilemmas thus arise for public authorities that seek to adjust to the times and still remain ‘in character’. The article contributes to organizational identity research by considering the hitherto overlooked immersion of social media use, humour and organizational identity formation.

Materiality and Identity

We explore the relationship between materiality and the instantiation of organizational identity, focusing on three elements of materiality—products, artifacts, and practices—and their role in shaping collective understandings of “who we are” and “what we do” as an organization. We advance a theoretical framework that posits that these three elements of materiality operate via three mechanisms that function in categorization, symbolization, and repertoires for performance, respectively, to affect organizational identity construction. Using illustrations from Apple, Inc., we put forward ideas that forge these links and propose an agenda for future research into the role of materiality in instantiating organizational identity.