Motivation and Justice at Work: The Role of Emotion and Cognition Components of Personal and Collective Work Identity

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of personal and collective work identity (including emotion and cognition components), in predicting work motivation (operationalized as work self-determined motivation) and organizational justice (operationalized as organizational pay justice). Digitized questionnaires were distributed by e-mail to 2905 members, teachers, of a Swedish trade union. A total of 768 individuals answered the questionnaire and by that participated in this study. Personal- compared to collective work identity was shown to positively associate with self-determined motivation accounted for by the emotion component of personal work identity. Collective compared to personal work identity was reported to positively associate with organizational pay justice accounted for by the cognition component of collective work identity. All this suggests that both work-related motivation and organizational justice might be, to some extent, accounted for by the psychological mechanisms of work identity and that, as predicted, different types of work identity, play different significant roles in predicting motivation and justice at work. More precisely, the emotion component of work identity was more pronounced in personal work-bonding relationships, and the cognitive component, of work identity in contrast, was more pronounced in collective work-bonding relationships.

Predicting general mental health and exhaustion: the role of emotion and cognition components of personal and collective work-identity

“…Following Cronbach alphas (α) applies to the different scales: .87 for collective work-identity, .78 for emotion- and .77 for cognition component, indicating good internal consistency (see DeVellis, 2003 ). As above, Nordhall and Knez (2018) reported an acceptable construct validity data fit (see Byrne, 2016 ) of Chi2 = 64.09, df = 7 (p = .000), CFI = .97 and RMSEA = .10 for the collective work-identity concept/measure.…”

“…The present study is a part of a larger research project on work-identity and health, resulting in several publications. Accordingly, the method section is consonant, in general terms, with previous publications within this project ( Nordhall and Knez, 2018 ).…”

“…In the present study, the Cronbach alpha (α) values were .86 for personal work-identity, .75 for emotion- and .84 for cognition component respectively, indicating acceptable-good internal consistency (see DeVellis, 2003 ). In addition, Nordhall and Knez (2018) reported a construct validity statistics for the personal work-identity construct/measure, showing an acceptable data fit (see Byrne, 2016 ) of Chi2 = 188.57, df = 28 (p = .000), CFI = .95 and RMSEA = .08.…”

“…(2013) , however, indicated that both personal- and collective work-identity were negatively related to exhaustion. This is probably due to the different definitions of work-identity involved in previous studies ( Pate et al., 2009 ; McConnell, 2011 ; Sedikides et al., 2011 ); not dividing and defining emotion and cognition components of work-identity when investigating relationships with different types of work-related outcomes ( Corley et al., 2006 ; Harquail and King, 2003 ; Knez, 2016 ; Knez et al., 2018 ; Nordhall and Knez, 2018 ). Kremer and Hofman (1985) , on the other hand, did address different types of work-related-self-presentation-profiles as personal work-identity in predicting burnout.…”

“…In differentiating between emotion and cognition components of personal- vs. collective work-identity, Nordhall and Knez (2018) recently showed that work-related outcomes may link differently to the emotion and cognition components of personal- and collective work-identity. More precisely, they reported that the effect of personal work-identity on self-determined work-motivation ( Ryan and Deci, 2000 ; Gagne and Deci, 2005 ; Tremblay et al., 2009 ) was accounted for by the emotion component, and that the impact of collective work-identity on organizational pay-justice ( Colquitt, 2001 ; Colquitt et al., 2013 ) was accounted for by the cognitive component.…”