Title
The Cascading Effect of Organizational Identification through Psychological Entitlement: Testing Sequential Mediation for Positive and Negative Outcomes
Abstract
Organizational identification has always been portrayed as an important factor responsible for a wide range of positive employee and organizational outcomes. However, researchers have recently started to realize that it might also cause negative employee outcomes, which must be explored to better understand this construct. Given this gap, current study investigates that organizational identification promotes positive and negative employee deviant behaviors (i) unethical pro-organizational behavior and (ii) pro-social rule breaking. This study further proposed that the relationship between organizational identification and employee outcomes is serially mediated by externally motivated organizational citizenship behavior, psychological entitlement, and status striving, respectively. This study also investigated the moderating role of high-quality leader member exchange and social dominance orientation as boundary conditions. Data for the current study were collected through adopted questionnaires from employees and their peers (N=509) working in public and private sector organizations of Pakistan. The current study has used SPSS, AMOS, and Process Macros by Hayes and additionally smart PLS for data analysis. The serial mediation model results showed that externally motivated OCB, psychological entitlement, and status striving serially mediates the relationship between organizational identification and unethical pro-organizational behavior. However, they do not serially mediate between organizational identification and pro-social rule breaking. Further, the results also support the moderation of LMX and social dominance orientation. The results of the current study are in line with the central proposition of identity theory and social identity theory. These results offer a wide range of theoretical implications also offers important implications for practitioners.