TheIandWeof Team Identification: A Multilevel Study of Exhaustion and (In)congruence Among Individuals and Teams in Team Identification

Abstract

The social identity approach to stress proposes that the beneficial effects of social identification develop through individual and group processes, but few studies have addressed both levels simultaneously. Using a multilevel person–environment fit framework, we investigate the group-level relationship between team identification (TI) and exhaustion, the individual-level relationship for people within a group, and the cross-level moderation effect to test whether individual-level exhaustion depends on the level of (in)congruence in TI between individuals and their group as a whole. We test our hypotheses in a sample of 525 employees from 82 teams. Multilevel polynomial regression analysis revealed a negative linear relationship between individual-level identification and exhaustion. Surprisingly, the relation between group-level identification and exhaustion was curvilinear, indicating that group-level identification was more beneficial at low and high levels compared with medium levels. As predicted, the cross-level moderation of the individual-level relationship by group-level identification was also significant, showing that as individuals became more incongruent in a positive direction (i.e., they identified more strongly than the average team member), they reported less exhaustion, but only if the group-level identification was average or high. These results emphasize the benefits of analyzing TI in a multilevel framework, with both theoretical and practical implications.

Healthcare workers use of psychological support resources during COVID-19; a mixed methods approach utilising Pillar Integration Analysis

“…There is substantial research evidence which suggests that the environment in which a person finds themselves impacts the salience of their identity and the supports that they feel are available to them particularly during transitions. Across a range of social contexts, identity and support are shaped by the groups with which people identify and with whom they feel they belong, and affiliation with these groups may have a downside for staff when they are moved outside the group [ 44 , 45 ].…”

Greetings from the New Editor: Directions for Group & Organization Management

“…We continue to welcome empirical (both qualitative and quantitative), review, and conceptual papers that extend management/organization science with a focus on individual behavior, teams and groups, strategy/organizational theory, human resource management, and business strategy. These papers should either make a strong theoretical (e.g., Watson, Kistler, Graham, & Sinclair, 2021 - winner of the 2021 best conceptual paper; Shoss, Horan, DiStaso, LeNoble, & Naranjo, 2021 – winner of the 2021 best quantitative paper) or a strong empirical contribution (e.g., Bernerth & Walker, 2020; Feldman & Greenway, 2021 – winner of the 2021 best qualitative paper; Junker van Dick, Häusser, Ellwart, & Zyphur, 2022) or some balance of both (e.g., Flynn, Bliese, Korsgaard, & Cannon, 2021; Wiese, Burke, Tang, Hernandez, & Howell, 2022). We are particularly excited in publishing papers that deal with pressing issues in the field of management, work and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and strategy such as (1) how the increased usage of hybrid work may impact our understanding of traditional management principles such as leadership, communication, organizational change, etc., (2) the importance of AI, robots, co-bots in the global context of management and work, (3) the rise in platform workers and the affective, attitudinal and behavioral consequences of platform work, (4) increased focus on minoritized and stigmatized workers, and (5) focus on the growing juxtaposition of sustainability, inclusion and diversity claims within organizations and a growing number of “working poor” employees.…”

Are we seeing “eye to eye” on qualitative job insecurity in healthcare? Employee–teammates perceptual (in)congruence and individual well-being

“…When the centered score equals 0, it means that an individual's QJI is as strong as teammates'. To keep the meaningfulness of the scores as they relate to the levels of QJI being low or high, the teammates' score was not centered (Junker et al, 2021). We then created three new variables: the square of the centered employee QJI, the cross-product of the centered employee QJI and teammate QJI, and the square of the teammate QJI (Edwards, 1994a).…”

“…However, in a multilevel polynomial regression framework, these effects are captured in a distinct manner. Here, we follow the procedure developed by Junker et al (2021). Specifically, the teammates' QJI effect (b 2 ) describes how individuals' well-being is predicted by the level of teammates' QJI.…”