Date

12-11-2024

Department

School of Behavioral Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD)

Chair

Matthew Swain

Keywords

organizational identification, self-perception theory, job attitudes

Disciplines

Psychology

Abstract

A new measure based on Self-Perception Theory for the job attitude organizational identification was developed. The Self-Perception Organizational Identification Scale measured the attitude by having participants evaluate past organizational loyalty behaviors, contrasting with the approach taken by the most widely used measure in the literature, the Mael scale, which only measured the cognitive appraisals of the attitude. The resulting reliability and validity study tested the new scale with a convenience sample of 332 adults working full-time at a focal organization for at least two months. The participants were given the Self-Perception Organizational Identification Scale along with the Mael scale and an unrelated scale. An exploratory factor analysis showed that the Self-Perception Organizational Identification Scale demonstrated unidimensionality, the reliability analysis showed that the new scale performed reliably with the population, and the correlational analysis showed that the new scale demonstrated convergent and divergent validity evidence, as it was significantly and positively correlated with the Mael scale and it was only weakly correlated with an unrelated scale. The results indicated that job attitudes can be measured by examining past behaviors, aligning with the Scriptural teaching that behaviors validate beliefs. The findings also contrast with the convention within Industrial-Organizational Psychology in recent decades to ignore behaviors in the measurement of job attitudes.

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