Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder: The Impact of Organizational Identification, Identity, and Image on the Cooperative Behaviors of Physicians

Abstract

We thank the participants in various seminars (Arizona State University, Copenhagen Business School, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, University of Western Ontario), Dan Brass, and three anonymous reviewers who provided many useful comments and suggestions for the research. We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of numerous former doctoral students who helped with data collection and coding, especially Tony Ammeter, Mason Carpenter, Suzanne Carter, Frances Hauge Fabian, and Jessica Simmons Jourdan. Special thanks go to Laurie Milton, who transcribed the focus group notes and helped develop the survey instrument. Finally, we thank the system administrators and physicians who graciously gave us their time and effort for this research.We use an established model of organizational identification to try to understand the voluntary cooperative behavior of professionals in organizations. We examined the relationships among physicians' assessments of the attractiveness of a health care system's perceived identity and construed external image, strength of system identification, and cooperative behaviors. We surveyed 1,504 physicians affiliated with three health care systems and collected follow-up data from 285 physicians a year later. Attractiveness of perceived identity and construed external image were positively related to physicians' identification with the system, which in turn was positively related to cooperative behavior. Extensions to the model of organizational identification are suggested.* Considerable attention has been given to the psychological attachment between organizations and their members and the consequences that such attachment has for each. Recently, a special issue of the Academy of Management Review was devoted to organizational identity and identification. The editors of that special issue (Albert, Ashforth, and Dutton, 2000: 14) noted that these concepts "provide a way of accounting for the agency of human action within an organizational framework." Although the concepts of identity and identification have generated a great deal of theoretical attention, relatively few empirical studies have been published that examine their effects. This is regrettable, because identity and identification may provide insights into some fundamental challenges of managerial life. For instance, the study of identity and identification may help us understand why some members of organizations regularly engage in cooperative behaviors that benefit the organization, whereas others do not. Theory on organizational identification (Ashforth and Mael, 1989;Dutton, Dukerich, and Harquail, 1994;Pratt, 1998;Elsbach, 1999) may provide a unique lens with which to view organizational members' decision to cooperate, particularly when there is no penalty for failure to engage in such behaviors, since decisions to engage in cooperative behaviors under these conditions are likely to be based on attitudes and cognitions about the organization (cf. Kramer, 1993), which are als...

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