WORKPLACE SELF-CONCEPT: A NEW CONCEPTUALIZATION OF
SELF-CONCEPT IN ORGANIZATIONS
GUO-HUA HUANG
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Management of Organizations
Clear Water Bay Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 6220-9512
Fax: (852) 2335-5325
e-mail: [email protected]
KENNETH S. LAW
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Department of Management
Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2609-7905
Fax: (852) 2603-5104
e-mail: [email protected]
KA-WAI CHAN
University of Macau
Faculty of Business Administration
Taipa, Macau
Tel: (853) 3974720
Fax: (853) 838320
e-mail: [email protected]
CHI-SUM WONG
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Department of Management
Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2609-7794
Fax: (852) 2603-6840
e-mail: [email protected]
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ABSTRACT
In this study, we conceptualized self-concept as an integration of role identity and self-evaluation.
Based on this conceptualization, we developed a workplace self-concept (WSC) construct that
describes an employee’s self-concept developed around work and organizational experiences.
Using inductive method, we developed an organization-based role-set that includes six
work-related roles. WSC is operationalized as an aggregate of the products of role identification
and role specific self-evaluation across the six roles. We argued that it has incremental
explanatory power for individual work outcomes, above and beyond the existing measures of
self-evaluation constructs (including general self-efficacy, core self-evaluations, and
organization-based self-esteem). We conducted two studies to validate the measure. Study one
used a sample of 111 MBA students and study two used a sample of 201 working people. Results
provide evidence for the validity and utility of WSC in studying individual work outcomes.
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Workplace Self-concept: A New Conceptualization of Self-concept in Organizations
Interest in the idea of the self-concept has a long history in social science research.
Abundant research evidence shows that how individuals view themselves would shape their
attitudes and behaviors. For example, a vast body of research on self-efficacy demonstrated that
people who believe that they can successfully meet task demands perform better than those who
do not (Bandura & Locke, 2003). There is also substantial evidence that the extent to which
individuals define themselves using social identities, such as gender or ethnic identity will
influence how they behave (Burke & Cast, 1998).
The potency of self-concept in studying human behavior being acknowledged, a review of
the literature also discloses great discrepancy about how the self-concept concept is
conceptualized. Because of some historical reasons, research on self-concept varies considerably
across different disciplines and areas. The main difference lies between two streams of research,
sociological and psychological research on self-concept. In psychology, researchers have
developed a number of “self”-related constructs to study an individual’s self-perception, such as
self-esteem (Korman, 1970), self-efficacy (Bandura, 1986), and core self evaluations (Judge,
Locke & Durham, 1997). In sociology (and social psychology rooted in sociology), researchers
have studied the effect of social structures on how individuals perceive themselves, primarily
focusing on individual’s social identity (Burke, 1991). This shows two divergent perspectives:
while psychologists use self-concept to refer to the evaluative aspects of it, such as self-esteem
and self-efficacy (Wylie, 1979), for sociologists and social psychologists, oftentimes it refers to a
structure of identities (Gecas & Burke, 1995). Both aspects, i.e., the evaluative and identity
aspects are important perspectives to study self-concept. Each of them has its strengths and
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limitations in studying human behavior.
Psychologists’ focusing on the evaluative dimension of how an individual view themselves
does not give much consideration of the identity dimension. Self-evaluation is an individual’s
belief about how good s/he is in certain aspect. It deals with the evaluative and emotional
perspectives of the self-concept. Identity is an individual’s self-definition based on his/her social
positions. It is the content aspect of self-concept. As Gecas (1982, pp.4) noted, identity “focuses
on the meanings comprising the self as an object, gives structure and content to self-concept, and
anchors the self to the social systems”. Put simply, the evaluation aspect answers the question of
“How do I perform?” while the identity aspect answers “Who am I?” Both questions are
important components of what an individual’s self-concept is.
Answers to the above two questions involve the “role” of the focal person. The sociological
term “role” refers to a position within a social framework (Mead, 1934; Turner, 1978). Each role
has a particular set of social role expectations for the actor (Katz & Kahn, 1978). The
internalized role expectations become an individual’s identity. To the extent that people identify
with certain roles, that is, they use the roles for self-definition, they use social expectations or
norms of the roles as references to evaluate themselves. Individuals all play multiple roles and
identify themselves with sets of roles. Different self-evaluations may be made when a person
considers his/her different roles. One example helps to illustrate the above discussion. When a
person gives his/her evaluation on “even when things are tough, I can perform quite well” (one
item from the new general self-efficacy scale (Chen, Gully & Eden, 2000)), s/he may think of
him/herself in different roles (e.g. as an employee, a researcher, or a parent). It is possible that
the person only thinks of his/her most important role(s) or thinks of different roles that are made
salient at the time s/he responds to the item. The result is that s/he would ignore self-evaluations
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of some roles in forming his/her overall self-evaluation. Moreover, roles differ in importance to
the focal person. Self-evaluations of the more central roles should have higher “weights” in
forming a person’s overall self-evaluation. Hence, existing measures of individuals’
self-evaluation do not give a full picture of how an individual views him/herself.
Another possibility is that individuals implicitly weighted all of their roles to form an
overall self-evaluation. This involves the question about the development and structure of
general self-evaluation and its relationship with self-evaluations within more specific domains.
Psychologists have studied global self-evaluations (such as global self-esteem and general
self-efficacy) and specific self-evaluations (such as academic self-esteem, task specific
self-efficacy), but the relationship between the two has been inadequately investigated
(Rosenberg et al., 1995). Preliminary efforts in the literature show that they are reciprocally
influenced and developed in an interactive way. There is no strong theory or evidence to accept
or reject the possibility of “implicit-weight” (i.e. an individual’s global self-evaluation is formed
by implicitly weighting his/her specific self-evaluations in various sub-domains). However, we
do know that global self-evaluation does not catch everything in specific self-evaluations
(Rosenberg, 1995). Moreover, even if there are implicit weights in forming the global self-views,
we do not know what the “weights” are and how they are formed. In this study, we propose that
the roles in the relevant role-set of an individual provide a good framework to structure
self-concept. Using roles as a framework, the identity and self-evaluation aspects can be
integrated and we can get a more complete picture of individuals’ self-concept.
The above review of the diverse literatures on self-concept leads to our proposition that
self-concept should be an integration of self-evaluation and identity. This is consistent with
Gecas’ (1982, pp.4) view of the self-concept, which stressed that the distinction between two
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dimensions of the self-concept is elementary and useful: “the content of self-conceptions (e.g.
identities) and self-evaluations (e.g. self-esteem)”. Unfortunately, however, there have been no
studies in the literature that integrate these dimensions in studying the self-concept. One reason
could be that this involves an interdisciplinary integration of the literature – self-evaluations are
mostly studied by psychologists while role and identity is traditionally a subject of sociological
and social psychological research. This multidisciplinary integration is one of the primary goals
of the current study.
We also aim to contribute to the management literature by studying self-concept that is
specific to the work and organization domain. Because of the reason of “specificity matching”
(Eden, 2001; which means performance will be better predicted when researchers match the
specificity/generality of the efficacy or motivational construct to the specificity/generality of the
performance measure), and the fact that a work organization is an important domain of people’s
lives in modern societies, we expect that there is a self-concept specific to the work and
organization domain, which is more appropriate for studying organizational behavior than global
self-concept or self-concept specific to other domains. This leads to our introduction of a new
construct: the workplace self-concept (WSC), which refers to the totality of the perceptions that
individual has of him/herself at workplace. The development and validation of the WSC
construct is the purpose of this study.
We organize this paper in the following way. We first review research on self-concept and
discuss the importance of integrating self-evaluation and identity in the new conceptualization of
self-concept. We then propose the core construct of WSC and its operationalization. Two studies
are described to demonstrate the construct validity of WSC, focusing on its discriminant validity
with and predictive validity above and beyond other existing constructs (including the general
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self-efficacy, core self-evaluations and organization-based self-esteem). Finally, we conclude
with a discussion on the theoretical contributions to organizational research, practical
implications, limitations, and potential for future research.
SELF-CONCEPT: AN INTEGRATION OF ROLE INDENTIY AND SELF-EVALUATION
Researchers studying the structure of self-concept found evidence that self-concept is a
multidimensional construct (Hattie, 1992) and they used various ways to describe the complex
phenomena. For instance, educational psychologists Marsh and his collaborators examined the
relationship of subjects’ self-evaluations on 12 facets, such as math, verbal, appearance, and
relationship with parents (Marsh & Gouvernet, 1989). Simpson and Boyle (1975) differentiate
three types of self-esteem: (a) global, a general evaluation; (b) situation specific, referring to a
situation such as work versus family; and (c) task specific, which refers to a particular activity.
These self-concept models all have their strengths in studying the phenomena in particular
research settings. However, there is no one clear framework that can apply for self-concept at the
organizational setting. In present study, we posit that the role identity can be such a framework.
In the following, I draw on the literature on role and identity theories to analyze: (a) why role
identity is a good framework for a model of self-concept; (b) how to conceptualize self-concept
through an integration of role identities and role-specific self-evaluations.
To justify why it is meaningful to structure individuals’ self-concept in organizations using
individuals’ roles in work-settings, we can first look at Katz and Kahn’s (1978) model of
organization. In a seminal contribution to the role literature, Katz and Kahn (1978) dedicated a
whole chapter to describing organizations as a role system. The main idea is that roles provide
formal organizations with constancy, in spite of turnover. The organizational behavior of
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individual depends on learning expectations of others, accepting them, and fulfilling them. The
authors proposed a model about the taking of organizational roles based on following steps: role
expectations are evaluative standards applied to the behavior of any person who occupies a given
organizational office or position; the sent-role consists of communications stemming from role
expectations and sent by members of the role-set as attempts to influence the focal person; the
received role is the focal person's perception of the role-sending so addressed, including the
reflexive role expectations that the focal person "sends" to himself or herself; finally, the role
behavior is the response of the focal person to the complex of information and influence thus
received. According to this model, individuals are involved in the ongoing process of role
sending and role behaviors in organizations. Thus, roles can be a good perspective to catch the
primary domains of an individuals’ work and organizational experiences, and hence a good
framework to structure WSC.
The concept of role is one of the most popular ideas in the history of social sciences. Many
influential ideas are reflected in role theory and identity theory. The basic idea of role theory
concerns one of the most important characteristics of social behavior—the fact that human
beings behave in ways that are different and predictable depending on their respective social
positions (Biddle, 1979, 1986; see Biddle, 1986 for a review on different perspectives of role
theory). As social actors, people have multiple roles in a society. The term “role-set” was
introduced by Merton (1957) to refer to “the complement of role relationships which persons
have by virtue of occupying a particular social status.” Associated with each role are certain
expectations that persons in that role are expected to fulfill. Role expectations can be formal
requirement or norms. It refers to “the general expectations of a demand character for all role
incumbents of a system" (Katz & Kahn, 1978). From this perspective, roles are indispensable in
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self-evaluations in that they provide individuals or the role incumbents the references for
appraisal and regulation of their attitudes and behaviors. While role theory suggests the
importance of role in affecting individual behaviors, for its effect to happen, individuals’
acceptance and internalization of the role expectations is required. This is suggested in identity
theory.
In identity theory, roles are external and linked to social positions within the social structure,
whereas identities are internal, consisting of internalized meanings and expectations associated
with roles (Stryker & Burke, 2000). In some sense, both role and identity answers who we are,
but the former answers the question to others, while the latter to ourselves. Identity defined in
this way can also be called role identity, or social role identity, terms we use interchangeably in
this paper. According to identity theory, the multiple identities that an individual has are not of
the same importance to the individual, but are ordered in a hierarchy (Deaux, 1996). One
important dimension around which the multiple identities of an individual can be organized is
identification, which has also been referred to as role embracement, role fusion, or role-person
merger (Ashforth, 2001). It reflects the idea that, as the extent to which the person internalizes
the role and defines him/herself according to the role expectations increases, the identity
becomes more central to the self-definition.
Identification stresses individual’s internalization of role expectations and using it to define
him/herself. The greater an identity is incorporated into an individual’s “self”, the larger the
impact of self-evaluation of that particular identity is on how the individual views him/herself
overall. We refer to role identification as the level of identification with a specific role, and
role-specific self-evaluation as an individual’s evaluation of him/herself in playing a specific role.
To use an example to illustrate, when a person identifies with his role as a parent higher than he
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identifies with his role as an employee, his overall self-concept will be higher when he evaluates
himself as a good parent than when he evaluates himself as a good employee.
The above discussion implies a way to integrate the role identity and self-evaluation
dimensions. That is, self-concept can be operationalized as the aggregate of the product of role
identification and role-specific self-evaluation across all the roles in an individual’s role-set.
WORKPLACE SELF-CONCEPT: A THEORY-BASED MEASURE AND ITS
CONSTRUCT VALIDITY
The Workplace Self-concept construct and its operationalization
Our work and organizational experience constitutes an important domain of our lives.
It
partially answers the question of “who we are” and thus constitutes an indispensable part of our
overall self-concept, depending on the meaning of work to our whole “self”. We define this
sub-domain self-concept developed around people’s work and organizational experiences as the
workplace self-concept. We use “workplace” to refer to the domain of an individual’s experience
in the work organization. Within this context, individuals all play multiple roles based on their
organizational membership and they contribute to the organization through working in these
roles. Organizations, as social structures, can be viewed as a system of roles (Katz & Kahn,
1978). Individuals working in organizations can have numerous potential roles. If we can classify
the multiple roles into a small set of categories so that one role-set can cover the work domain
for most individuals, such an organization-based role-set would provide researchers a good
framework to study an individual’s self-concept specific to the work organization domain. As
there are some relevant frameworks about work-related roles in the literature but none of them
can be directly applied in this case, we use inductive methods to develop an organization-based
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role-set. Under the new conceptualization of self-concept proposed above, WSC can then be
operationalized as the aggregate of the products of role identification and role-specific
self-evaluation across the roles in an individual’s organization-based role-set. Symbolically, this
can be expressed in the following formula:
WSC = ∑ j =1 IjEj
n
,
where, Ij is role identification of the jth role; Ej is role specific self-evaluation of the jth role; and
n is the total number of roles in an individual’s organization-based role-set.
The proposed WSC construct involves three components: role identification (identity
aspect), role-specific self-evaluation (self-evaluation aspect), and an organization-based role-set.
While the identity and self-evaluation components can be operationalized following existing
literature, there are few studies that systematically studied the multiple roles in organizational
settings1. Using inductive approach (Hinkin, 1998) as presented in study 1 in the method part, we
identified an organization-based role-set that includes six types of roles. Each of the roles is
defined in terms of its reference (or role-sender) and the role expectations: (1) An employee role,
which more precisely refers to a member of the work organization. The reference of this role is
the organization as a whole. In general, an organization’s expectations for its members include
commitment and effectiveness; (2) a colleague role, the reference of which is the other members
of the organization. This role is associated with expectations such as being cooperative and
supportive to other colleagues; (3) a supervisor role, the reference of which is the focal person’s
subordinate(s). This role is associated with the formal requirements of a supervisor job and even
more importantly, some general or informal expectations for a leader such as being supportive to
and caring subordinates; (4) a subordinate role, the reference of which is the focal person’s
supervisor. Expectations for this role may vary a lot, depending on the situational context such as
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job characteristics and leadership style. However, in general, subordinates by definition, are
supposed to fulfill leader’s command (either in formal or informal forms) and be loyal to the
leader; (5) a group member role, the reference of which is the whole group or other members in
the group. Groups can be any organizationally formed group(s) such as project teams. Generally,
expectations for this role can be represented in the word of “team-spirit” which implies various
attitudinal and behavioral expectations such as being cooperative, and knowledge sharing. The
emerging of this role is consistent with the fact that organizations nowadays are using
teams/groups increasingly; and (6) an occupation role. I define this role as the job content part of
an individual’s work experience within an organization. The reference of this role is the
occupational group and role expectations come from the incumbents’ organizations and the
occupational norms. For instance, a professor role involves fulfilling research and teaching jobs
in an institution. Expectations for a professor are defined by the institution and the general norms
or standards in the academic community as well. Table 1 summarizes the referents and examples
of the role expectations associated with each role in this organization-based role-set.
--------------------------------Insert Table 1 about here.
--------------------------------This organization-based role-set is the best result generated from a study using inductive
approach. The content validity evidence for it is analyzed in the method part. In addition, several
clarifications need to be made with regard to this role-set. First, the six roles are defined within
the work organization domain. They are either formally defined by the organization (such as
supervisor, and subordinate roles) or can be easily conceived and defined by individuals (such as
colleague role). This set of roles is derived from a quite comprehensive set of roles. They
represent the most important roles in work settings, although they may not be all-inclusive.
Second, although each of the roles has clear referent, there are some overlaps among some
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of the roles in terms of the role expectations. This is unavoidable and understandable,
considering that the final goal of all the work-related roles is the effective functioning of the
organization. For example, while the employee and subordinate roles are both associated with
following rules and be loyal, the former emphasizes organizational rules and commitment to the
whole organization while the latter stresses following supervisor’s directions and loyalty to the
supervisor. As another example, cooperativeness and helping behaviors are emphasized for both
the colleague and group member role, but the spheres of influence differ for the two roles – one
is all the other organizational members in general and another is the particular group members in
which one belongs to.
Finally, we do not explicitly define the role expectations for each role because it is difficult,
if not impossible, to have a complete list of what is expected of each and every role. This is not a
problem, however. Although specific role expectations may vary across situations and
individuals, each role is associated with some general socially defined expectations, as listed in
the examples in table 1. Moreover, what we focus on in the present study is not the social
expectations per se, but the internalized role expectations, that is, identity. Individuals identify
with the roles and evaluate their role-specific performances based on their own understanding of
roles (which is inevitably constrained by the socially defined meaning of the role), and the effect
of WSC is based on the level of identification and evaluation.
After the role-set being identified, measures for role identifications and role-specific
self-evaluations can be developed for the six roles. Identification has been measured in the
literature with various foci, such as identification with gender, ethnic group, and organization.
We developed 5 items for measuring identification with each of the six roles by adopting existing
measures and revising the foci of the items. Thus there are 30 items for measuring the role
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identification components of WSC. Self-evaluation as a general concept can be measured from
many aspects, such as self-esteem (including global and specific self-esteem) and self-efficacy
(including general and task-specific self-esteem) and there are a lot of tools in the literature. For
WSC, the self-evaluations are role-specific. The reference of appraisal is clearly the role
expectations for each specific role. Although multi-item scales can be developed to measure how
individuals rate themselves for each of the roles, in its simplest form (which is always desirable
for a measurement tool), a single item asking respondents how well they play each of the roles
can do (e.g., Rosenberg et al., 1995). We measure role-specific self-evaluation using one item for
each of the six roles. Thus there are 6 items for measuring the self-evaluation components of
WSC. A complete list of the 36 items is shown in APPENDIX .
Construct Validity of Workplace Self-concept
Now we have discussed the definition and operationalization of the proposed WSC
construct. Next, we discuss its construct validity. Following guidelines for construct validation
(Schwab, 1980), we validate the proposed WSC construct through examining its content validity,
convergent validity, discriminant validity, and criterion validity.
Two issues need to be addressed for the content validity of WSC. Firstly, whether the two
dimensions, role identity and self-evaluation, represent individuals’ self-concept well. This is a
theoretical issue. Our conceptualization of self-concept as an integration of the two aspects is
based on a broad review of the literature, which suggests those two are essential aspects of
individuals’ perceptions about “self”. The way we integrate the two dimensions is based on role
and identities theories. Secondly, the proposed operationalization should cover the content
domain of WSC as we defined. It is very important that the organization-based role-set reflects
the domain of an individual’s work and organizational experience. In other words, the six roles
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should cover the most important role relationships in work organizational settings. It is even
more important considering the lack of theoretical guidance and previous measures in the
literature. Content validity in this respect can partially be assessed by the procedures and results
of the inductive method we used to develop the role-set. The basic requirements are, first, the
role-set should be identified from a pool of work-related roles that has sufficient diversity and
range; second, the roles included in the final role-set should have clear meaning and be
distinguishable from each other.
To examine whether WSC converge with similar measures (convergent validity) and also
can be distinguished from existing measures (discriminant validity), we examine the relationship
between WSC and the following variables: organization-based self-esteem (OBSE, Pierce et al.,
1989), the general self-efficacy (Chen et al., 2001), and core self-evaluations (Judge et al., 1997).
These variables are chosen because of several reasons. (1) They are relatively established
constructs about self-evaluation in the literature. (2) They represent some different theoretical
arguments about self-evaluation. Self-efficacy is about an individual’s belief about the
probability that s/he can successfully meet task demands; self-esteem is about the worthiness that
an individual attaches to him/herself; and core self-evaluations is argued to be a more
fundamental latent variable underlying self-efficacy and self-esteem (together with neuroticism
and locus of control). (3) They represent self-evaluation at different levels. While general
self-efficacy and core self-evaluations are “global” concepts, OBSE is specific to the
organization domain, which is particularly relevant to the present study.
To examine whether the relationship between WSC and other variables demonstrates
convergent and discriminant validity, we first look at the level of correlations among them. We
expect that the correlations between WSC and other variables (including general self-efficacy,
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OBSE, and core self evaluations) are moderate and lower than the correlations among the three
self-evaluations variables. We also examine whether WSC predicts work-related outcomes after
controlling those existing variables, that is, to see the incremental validity of WSC. Detailed
reasoning for the incremental contribution of WSC is presented in hypothesis development part.
We examine criterion-related validity of WSC by looking at how it is associated with three
criteria: (1) satisfaction with one’s overall work experience, (2) job performance, and (3)
prosocial work behaviors. These three criteria are chosen because there are well-established
instruments for them in the literature. We discuss the theoretical reasons underlie the
relationships between WSC and the three criterion variables in the next.
Theory and Hypotheses
Theoretical reasons for the above criterion validity can be analyzed from the two
dimensions respectively and integratively. From the perspective of the role identity dimension,
three theoretical approaches can be applied to explain the relationship between WSC and the
criteria. They are: role theory, identity theory, and social identity theory. These theories
combined suggest a positive relationship between the role identifications components of WSC
and individuals’ work outcomes. As discussed above, according to role theory, each role has
certain social expectations. These role expectations consist of the (role-senders’) preferences
with respect to specific behaviors, as well as personal characteristics or style, ideas about what
the person should be, should think, or should believe (Katz & Kahn, 1978, pp. 190). To the
degree that a person values or identifies with some role, s/he internalizes the social role
expectations and uses them as references for their self-appraisal and regulation. In this way, these
role expectations would shape the attitudes, behaviors, or other characteristics of an individual.
Although the six roles included in the WSC role-set have different references and role
17
expectations, they are all organization-based and each has certain “organizational expectations”
due to their relevance to the effectiveness of organizations. Though the occupation role may go
beyond a specific organization, role expectations of an occupation are usually required by the
organization. Individual efforts such as meeting occupational standards and developing
occupational skills are usually in line with organizational expectations and benefit organizations.
(There are cases when one’s pursuing of occupational development conflicts with organizational
expectation. In such cases, people may choose to leave but not to lower their job performance.)
These organizational expectations, once internalized by an individual, will shape the individual’s
work attitudes and behaviors.
From the perspective of self-evaluation dimension, there are solid theoretical bases and
substantial evidence linking self-evaluation to individual outcomes (Pierce & Gardner, 2004). To
address the reasons why self-evaluation is central to the explanation of human attitudes and
behaviors, scholars have identified several motivational mechanisms. As Baumeister (1997,
pp.690), who treated self-concept mostly from the self-evaluation perspective, noted, “the two
main motivations regarding self-concept are consistency and favorability.” Self-consistency
theory (Korman, 1970) is built on the once-dominant social psychological theories of cognitive
consistency (Festinger, 1957; Heider, 1958). It argues that all other things being equal,
individuals will engage in and find satisfying those behaviors that maximize their sense of
cognitive balance or consistency. According to Korman, (1970), people have a need to align their
level of performance with their self-esteem. He posited that individuals will be motivated to
perform on a task or job in a manner that is consistent with the self-image with which they
approach the task or job situation.
As an alternative to self-consistence theory, self-enhancement theory posits that low as well
18
as high self-esteem individuals have basic needs to enhance, instead of being consistent with,
their level of self-esteem (Dipboye, 1977). In other words, people strive to think well of
themselves. Apparently, self-consistency and self-enhancement theories would give the same
prediction for people who hold positive views about themselves – motivation to be consistent or
to further enhance their current self-evaluations would both lead to positive outcomes. However,
when it comes to those who hold negative views about themselves, the two theories give
different explanations – they will either behave at a low level to be consistent with the low
self-evaluation (according to self-consistency argument), or strive to enhance their
self-evaluation (according to self-enhancement argument). Regarding this inconsistency
prediction, scholars have found evidence that both of them are viable explanations depending on
different situations (Swann et al., 1987). The consensus now seems to be that individuals, with
either high or low self-esteem, all desire for self-esteem and strive for it. However, people with
low self-esteem want to success as high self-esteem persons do, but are simply less confident that
they will be able to do so (Baumeister, 1999). Scholars now identified that the broadest
motivational pattern associated with low self-esteem seems to be one of self-protection
(Baumeister, 1999; Korman, 2001), which argues that “people with low self-esteem worry about
failure, rejection, humiliation, and other unpleasant outcomes, and they seem to go through life
watching out for such dangers and trying to minimize them” (Baumeister, 1999, pp. 357).
Proponents of self-enhancement theory argue that, for the failure of those who has low
self-evaluations, it may reflect a rational decision to exert low effort to prevent further erosion of
their self-esteem rather than an irrational consistency with the self-perception of inadequacy
(Sedikides, Gaertner, & Toguchi, 2003). Thus, although the motivational process for people with
low self-evaluation as predicted by self-enhancement theory may differ from that predicted by
19
the consistency theory, their prediction on performance outcomes can be consistent – other things
being equal, people with positive views about themselves have better outcomes than these who
hold negative views.
In summary, the above discussion shows that both the identity and self-evaluation
dimension are positively associated with desirable work outcomes. In our conceptualization of
WSC, both identification and self-evaluation are role-specific and are anchored in six roles. Role
identifications motivate individuals’ efforts toward fulfilling role expectations for each of the six
roles, which include such things as positive attitudes toward the work and organizational
experience and higher performance. Role-specific self-evaluations motivate individuals to strive
for consistent or enhanced self-views with respect to each of the six work roles. These two
mechanisms combined suggest a positive association between WSC and individuals’ attitudinal
and behavior outcomes. Based on this, we develop the following hypotheses to be tested for the
relationships between WSC and the criterion variables.
WSC and job performance. A central corollary of self-consistency theory is that people
have a need to align their level of performance with their self-evaluation. Performance levels that
are inconsistent with self-evaluations cause conflict in one’s cognition. Such a need to be
consistent becomes an inner drive for one to achieve performance at a certain level.
Self-enhancement theory predicts that low self-evaluation people may, in accord with predictions
of consistency theory, withhold effort so that there is no further erosion to their self-esteem.
From the role identity perspective, three of the six roles in WSC, the employee, subordinate, and
occupation roles directly involve expectations about high job performance of the focal person.
People who identify with these roles internalize the social expectations and, as a result, are
motivated to perform better. Based on the above argument, I hypothesize that:
20
Hypothesis 1. Workplace self-concept is positively related to job performance.
WSC and prosocial work behaviors. Prosocial work behaviors in organizational context are
those behaviors that are not required for one’s job performance but are important for
organizational effectiveness. Such behaviors as caring co-workers and being cooperative with
others are sometimes called “extra role behaviors” in the literature when the “in-role” refers
specifically to the job performance. They are in fact important role expectations for the employee,
colleague and group member roles. Individuals who value or identify with these roles will have
the motivation to make those “extra” (though not “extra” in terms of role expectations of these
roles) efforts to meet such expectations. From the self-consistency perspective, individuals who
perceive themselves as good colleagues, and group member, would be motivated to perform such
behaviors so that their high self-evaluations would be maintained. From the self-protection
perspective, because performing such behavior requires individuals being initiative, it is less
likely that people with low self-evaluation will perform such behaviors in fear of rejection or
failure (Baumeister, 1999), compared with those with high self-evaluation.
Hypothesis 2. Workplace self-concept is positively related to prosocial work behaviors.
WSC and job satisfaction. The organization-based role-set in WSC covers the major part of
the domain of individual’s work organizational experiences. As a result, it should reflect
individuals’ attitude toward the work domain. The overall job satisfaction has five facets:
satisfaction with the work itself, pay, supervision, coworker, and opportunity for promotion
(Hackman & Oldham, 1975). Each of these facets is directly related with one or more of the six
roles. In particular, the occupation role is more related with the facet of work content, the
subordinate role with the supervision facet, and the colleague and group member role with the
coworker facet of the job. Identification with these roles would lead to satisfaction with the
21
corresponding job facets. For instance, a high identification with one’s professional role means
that the individual accepts the meaning of the job, which is a source of intrinsic work motivation,
which in turn leads to satisfaction with the “work itself” facet directly or indirectly through a
higher job performance. From the self-evaluation perspective, those who evaluate themselves
high would generate attitudes that are consistent with their positive self-views while it is less
likely that those who evaluate themselves low will be satisfied with the specific facets or the
overall job.
Hypothesis 3. Workplace self-concept is positively related to job satisfaction.
WSC and career satisfaction. In addition to the above three criterion variables, we also
examine the relationship between WSC and career outcome, particularly career satisfaction in
this study. Career satisfaction (Greenhaus, Parasuraman & Wormley, 1990) refers to the overall
reaction of individuals to their chosen careers. The occupation role in WSC builds a link between
WSC and individuals’ career outcome. Individuals who identify with this role internalize the
social expectations of their particular occupation, which intrinsically promotes positive attitudes
toward their career. From the self-evaluation perspective, those who have high self-evaluations in
their occupation role will have more positive attitudes toward their career, as people tend to find
satisfying those things they believe they do well in. Although the above discussion is grounded in
the occupation role, other roles, such as the employee, subordinate, and group member roles
could also be associated with career attitudes because career experience usually cannot be
separated from organizational experiences.
Hypothesis 4. Workplace self-concept is positively related to career satisfaction.
In summary, the above hypotheses propose that WSC is positively associated with desirable
work-related outcomes. We further argue that WSC has added value in predicting these outcomes
22
above and beyond existing self-related constructs, including general self-efficacy (Chen et al.,
2001), core self evaluations (Judge et al., 1997), and OBSE (Pierce et al., 1989). There are three
reasons for the incremental contribution of WSC. First, WSC has role identity components. Role
identity theories suggest a direct effect of role identity on work outcomes. Secondly, we
developed an organization-based role-set which covers the domain of individual work
organization experiences. Each of the six roles in our WSC model brings some particular
information of one’s self in the work and organizational context. Explicitly including these six
roles would help to catch more complete information about how individuals view themselves at
workplace. Thus we expect that WSC has incremental predictive power on work attitudes and
behaviors above and beyond the effects of general self-efficacy, core self evaluations, and
organization-based self-esteem.
METHOD
To validate the proposed WSC construct, we conducted three studies. Study 1 was to
develop and validate the organization-based role-set. Studies 2 and 3 were to examine the
convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related construct validity.
Study 1
Sample and measure of study 1
A class of 35 part-time MBA students from a large university in Shanghai and another class
of 34 part-time EMBA students from Taiwan participate in the survey during class time.
Participants in the first sample are 25 to 35 years old and on average have 2 to 5 years work
experience. Participants in the second sample are more experienced and older (average job tenure
is more than 10 years and average age is about 40). There were about 50% and 30% of male
respondents in the first and second sample respectively. All the participants worked in different
23
companies in various industries. Thus the sample is quite diverse in terms of age, gender,
occupation, and organizational type.
Instruction in the survey questionnaire (in Chinese) says “We all have various roles in our
work. In some sense, those roles answer the question of ‘who am I’. For instance, ‘I am an
accountant’, ‘I am a leader’, etc. Each of those roles constitutes a part of our self-concept at work
to some extent. Now, please consider: what are the major roles that you have in your work?
Please list each of them in the following. ”
Procedure and results of study 1
The survey resulted in 538 role items (281 from the first sample, and 257 from the second
sample). On average, each participant named 6.8 roles. Two doctoral students in OB/HR who
know nothing about this study first independently sorted the items into work-related role
categories that they think are meaningful and fit. They then discussed to get an agreement. In
their final categorization, 21 items were considered as unclear or irrelevant (such as “communist
party member”, and “young people”). It included the following five categories (examples are
cited from the survey results): (1) formal functional roles based on job content or occupation
(e.g., accountant, department technical consultant); (2) formal roles based on hierarchy
(supervisor and subordinate) (e.g., department manager, assistant of my supervisor); (3) formal
role as an employee (e.g., employee, a member of xxx (company name)); (4) formal or informal
role as a team or group member (e.g., project team member, helper of my group); (5) informal
roles based on social networks in the organization (e.g., colleague, friend, social activity
coordinator).
We compared this categorization with the existing frameworks and revised it into six types
of roles so that each of them has a clear reference and relatively clear role expectations (results
24
presented in The workplace self-concept construct and its operationalization section). The first
author discussed with the two sorters and they agreed that this categorization was consistent with
their categorization approach and clearer. Following this, we asked another two management
doctoral students to independently categorize all the 538 roles into the six roles with a seventh
category as “unclear/irrelevant”. (The sorting results are available upon request). Inter-rater
agreement between the two raters, using weighted kappa coefficient calculated with SPSS, is .66.
This result can be interpreted as substantial inter-rater reliability (Landis & Koch, 1977). Thus,
the six roles represent most of the roles in work context and can be reasonably distinguished
from each other, which provides evidence for the content validity of WSC.
Study 2
Participants and Procedures of study 2
One hundred and thirteen part-time MBA students at a university in east China participated
anonymously in the survey during class time, which took about 25 minutes. The mean age of the
participants was 32 years old. Seventy-two per cent were male. All the participants were
employed in for-profit firms or local government departments. Most of them played all six roles
in WSC. Two participants were not supervisors (we ask respondents to put zero for the roles that
are not applicable to them) and were deleted, which resulted in a sample size of 111. We did this
because our measure of WSC is an aggregation across all roles. It is not fairly comparable for
people whose numbers of roles are different. We discuss this issue in later part in this paper.
Measures of study 2
Workplace self-concept. WSC is the aggregate of the products of role identification and
role-specific self-evaluation of each of the six roles in the organization-based role-set. Role
identification was measured using 5-item scales for each of the six roles, which were developed
25
and adapted from existing identification measures (e.g., Sidanius et al. 2004). The five items for
the employee role, for example, are: “I often tell others that I am an employee of my
organization”; “I uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I” when I mention my organization to others”; “I feel
close to other members of my organization”; “I often think of ‘I am an employee of xx (name of
your work organization)’, when I say or do something” “In many situations, I think of myself as
an employee of my organization.” Items are rated on a 7-point scale. Identification with other
roles is measured by replacing “employee” with other roles and changing the wording wherever
necessary. We measured role-specific self-evaluation using the simplest way, by asking
respondents to rate how they perform in each of the six roles on a 10-point scale. The final score
of WSC is the sum of the six products of role identification and role specific self-evaluations for
each of the six roles. All items are listed in APPENDIX .
Other variables. Criterion variable Job satisfaction was measured by the six-item measure
from the Job Diagnostic Survey (Hackman & Oldham, 1975), which measures satisfaction with
five aspects of the job (the work itself, pay, supervisor, coworker, and promotion) and overall
satisfaction with the job (α = .85). We measured general self-efficacy using the eight-item New
General Self-efficacy Scale (NGSE) by Chen et al. (2001), which was developed based on
previous theory-based measures and validated through several studies. A sample item is “I will
be able to achieve most of the goals that I have set for myself.” (α = .93). Core self-evaluations
were measured by the recently developed twelve-item Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES) by
Judge and his colleagues (Judge et al., 2003). A sample item is “I am confident I get the success I
deserve in life.” The internal consistency of this measure is .70, which was lower than what
Judge et al. reported (about .85). OBSE was measured with the ten-item instrument developed by
Pierce et al. (1989). The instructions ask the respondent to think about his/her relationship with
26
his/her employing organization and to indicate the degree to which he/she has “come to believe
in each of the following statements”. Some sample items are “I count around here” and “I am
taken seriously around here.” (α = .92). The response format of all the above measures was a
7-point Likert-type scale (from strongly disagree to strongly agree). To make the survey easy for
participants, we translated all English measures into Chinese, following the standard
translation-back translation procedure (Brislin, 1980).
We also included five demographic variables because of their potential effects on work
attitudes and behaviors: (1) age, measured by the years; (2) gender (1=male, 2=female); (3) level
of education (Below middle school, Middle school, College, Bachelor, Master, and Doctoral
were coded from 1 to 6); (4), (5) organizational tenure and job tenure (open question asking
respondents to indicate their tenure with their current organizations and jobs in terms of the
number of years and months).
Results and discussion of study 2
Descriptive statistics and the correlations among measures are shown in Table 2. All
measures had acceptable reliability in terms of internal consistency. It should be noted that,
because I conceptualize WSC as an aggregate model (Law, Wong, & Mobley, 1998), that is, the
six role facets (as a product of role identification and role specific self-evaluation) are formative
indicators of WSC, it does not have reliability alpha. For the same reason, we did not conduct
confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for WSC and the three self-evaluation variables to examine
the discriminant validity of WSC. We did a CFA to examine the structure of the role
identification measure. A model which specified a six factor solution to the 30 items (five items
for each of the six roles) produced acceptable fit indexes on this sample (RMSEA = .08; NNFI
= .93, CFI = .96), which demonstrated that identification measure for the six roles can be
27
differentiated. Table 2 shows that WSC had a moderate level of correlation with the three
self-evaluation constructs (r = .40 to .57, p < .01), which was a little lower than the correlations
among the three.
This demonstrates that WSC had some commonality with but is distinct from
these established constructs, providing evidence for convergent and discriminant validity.
------------------------------Insert Table 2 about here.
------------------------------We conducted hierarchical regression analyses to test whether WSC is associated with job
satisfaction after controlling the effect of control variables and the three self-evaluation
constructs. Results in Table 3 demonstrated the effect of WSC above and beyond existing
variables. Thus, evidence for discriminant and criterion-related validity was found.
---------------------------------------------Insert Tables 3 about here.
---------------------------------------------To gather further evidence for the validity of the new conceptualization of WSC, we
conducted another set of analyses to test whether the six interaction terms has incremental
predictive power over the identification and self-evaluation dimension alone (argument for
multiplicative model). Results show that above the main effects of self-evaluation dimension (six
role specific self-evaluation terms as one block in the regression) and role identification
dimension (six role identification terms as one block), the six interaction terms representing the
six role facets still have significant effect on job satisfaction (results available upon request).
Results from study 2 provided evidence for the convergent, discriminant, and
criterion-related validity of WSC. However, all the results of this study were based on self-report
measures, which may cause common method variance biases. To address such concerns and to
examine the effect of WSC on a larger set of outcomes, we conducted study three to further
validate WSC.
Study 3
28
Participants and Procedures of study 3
We collected data from three sources in this study. We measured behavioral outcomes in this
study, including the supervisor’s rating of the subject’s job performance and a coworker’s rating
of the subject’s prosocial behaviors. Different from study 2, we only included general
self-efficacy and OBSE to examine the discriminant and incremental predictive validity of WSC.
Core self-evaluations scale was dropped because it did not indicate satisfactory reliability and
predictive validity in study 2.
Each set of questionnaires in this study include three versions, which were rated
respectively by: 1) the respondent him/herself, 2) the respondent’s immediate supervisor, 3) one
of the respondent’s coworkers. Data were collected by 19 part-time MBA students in a top
university in Macau. Students were divided into four groups and did the data collection as part of
a group term project. They earned extra credit in a course for this data collection. Students were
asked to take the survey questionnaires back to their own companies and distribute the
questionnaires to their colleagues. The colleague sent the supervisor survey to his/her immediate
manager (each manager rated only one subordinate) and the coworker questionnaire to one of
his/her familiar coworkers. All questionnaires were sealed in envelopes by the corresponding
respondents and returned to the students and then to the instructor. All questionnaires were
completed anonymously, but they were coded so that they could be matched together. Students
collected a total of 212 sets of questionnaires. There were three unusable cases. Nine participants
who indicated they did not play the supervisor role were deleted, resulting in a final sample size
of 201. The mean age of the respondents in the final sample was 28 years old. Fifty-two per cent
were female. More than 80 per cent of the participants had a college or higher education level.
Because there were both Chinese and English native speakers in the sample, We distributed
29
questionnaires in both languages. For the Chinese version, all English measures were translated
following the standard translation-back translation procedure (Brislin, 1980).
Measures of study 3
All the variables in study 2 were included in study 3 using the same measures, except that
the core self-evaluations scale was not included.
Other variables (in addition to variables measured in study 2). Job performance was
measured by the eleven-item scale of task performance complied by Tsui, Pearce, Porter and
Tripoli (1997). It asks supervisors to rate, from low to high on a 5-point scale, employees’
performance on eleven aspects, such as work quantity, quality, efficiency, creativity, and so on.
(α = .92). As one measure for prosocial behavior, one of the coworkers who were familiar with
the participant rated the participant’s interpersonal cooperation, on a seven-point scale, using the
tool in McAllister’s (1995) measure of citizenship behaviors. It has seven items on peer
affiliative behavior and three items on peer assistance-oriented behavior. This 10-item scale has
been used to measure cooperation (e.g., Bartel, 2001). A sample item is “(He/she) tries not to
make things more difficult for others at work.” (α = .93). We measured Career satisfaction using
a five-item measure developed by Greenhaus et al. (1990), which measured respondents’
satisfaction with their progress in meeting their overall career goal, income, advancement, and
development of new skills goals in their careers. A sample item is “I am satisfied with the
progress I have made toward meeting my overall career goals.” (α = .91). The response format
was a seven-point Likert-type scale.
Results and discussion of study 3
Descriptive statistics and the correlations among measures are shown in Table 4. All
measures had high internal consistency reliability. Similar to study 2, WSC correlated
30
moderately with general self-efficacy (r = .52) and OBSE (r = .50). WSC was significantly
correlated with all the outcome variables. As in study 2, we did a CFA to examine how well the
items used to measure role identification with the six roles can be differentiated into six factors.
Results show that the six factor model fits the data (RMSEA = .08; NNFI = .95, CFI = .97),
which demonstrated that identification measure for the six roles can be differentiated.
---------------------------------------------Insert Tables 4 about here.
---------------------------------------------To investigate criterion and incremental predictive validity, we conducted a series of
hierarchical regression analyses. Results are shown in Table 5. Models 1 through 6 show that
WSC had incremental predictive power for the two self-reported criteria, after controlling for the
demographic variables and the two self-evaluation variables. Models 7 through 9 show that WSC
had incremental predictive power for job performance after controlling for general self-efficacy
and OBSE together (β = .18, ∆R2 = .02, p < .05). Models 10 through 12 show WSC had
incremental predictive power for interpersonal cooperation (β = .19, ∆R2 = .02, p < .05), after
controlling the two self-evaluation constructs altogether. Together, the above results demonstrate
discriminant and criterion-related validity of WSC.
---------------------------------------------Insert Tables 5 about here.
---------------------------------------------As in study 2, we also tested the incremental effect of WSC over the self-evaluation only
and the identification-only measures. Similar results were produced as in study 2 – the six
interaction terms as a block has effect on all the outcome variables after controlling for
demographic variables, general self-efficacy and OBSE, the six self-evaluation terms, and the six
identification terms (not reported, available upon request).
Results from study 3 further demonstrated the validity of WSC and its relationship with
31
work outcomes. WSC had incremental predictive power for supervisor rated job performance
and coworker rated cooperative behaviors above and beyond general self-efficacy and OBSE.
Although the amount of incremental variances explained by WSC are not large, the result is
notable considering the strong controlling and the different data sources (without controlling
general self-efficacy and OBSE, the variances explained by WSC are comparable to that by
general self-efficacy and much larger than by OBSE in this sample).
GENERAL DISCUSSION
In this study, we developed and validated a workplace self-concept construct that includes
two dimensions, self-evaluation and role identity, integrated through a set of work-related roles
in organizational settings. Our arguments for the effect of WSC on individual work outcomes are
built on solid theories, primarily the role identity theories and self-consistency and
self-enhancement theories. Results from two studies demonstrated that our proposed WSC
measure had discriminant and incremental predictive validity. It predicted individual overall job
satisfaction, job performance, prosocial work behaviors, and career satisfaction above and
beyond the effect of existing self-evaluation constructs, including general self-efficacy, core
self-evaluations, and organization-based self-esteem. This incremental validity is notable,
considering the substantial evidence of the impact of these self-evaluation constructs in studying
individual outcomes in the literature.
Findings from this study have important implications for practitioners. Industrial and
organizational psychologists have argued for the effectiveness of influencing employee
productivity through influencing their “performance-relevant cognitions”, such as self-esteem
and job efficacy (e.g., Brockner, 1988). Our findings provide support for this argument and, more
32
notably, add to it by highlighting the importance of employees’ social identities based on their
roles in organizations. According to results of this study, managers should attend not only to an
employee’s self-evaluation, but also to his/her organization-based role-set, and to the importance
of each of his/her role identities. Some straightforward implications that can be derived from this
are, for example, enhancing employees’ self-evaluations in the roles that they value most,
conveying organizations’ desired role expectations more clearly and strongly, and encouraging
employees to attach more importance to the roles that they can perform well than to other roles.
Because this study is an exploratory effort in studying organizational behavior from the
workplace self-concept perspective, it has a number of limitations that require further research
efforts. The first challenge is in the operationalization of WSC. Although there are theoretical
reasons for integrating the identity and self-evaluation components and the organization-based
role-set in the measure, it is still a question how to operationalize each of these elements. We
used only one item to ask individual’s self-evaluation of each role. This is the most direct and
concise way but may cause some concern for reliability. Future study may use multiple items for
this measure. For the organization-based role-set, this study suggested six roles. The limitation is
that WSC measured this way is only comparable among individuals who have the same role-set.
Future studies need to adjust the role-set to be included in WSC measure according to specific
sample.
The second limitation is that our two studies are cross-sectional in nature, which does not
enable us to make conclusions on “causal” relationships. However, this does not change our
conclusions on the validity of WSC. Although self-consistency/enhancement theories suggest
attitudes and behaviors as outcomes of people’s self-perceptions, they do not exclude the
influences of these “outcomes” on self-perceptions. There could be dynamic process going on
33
outside the model studied here. In fact, the reciprocal relationship between self-evaluation and
behavior has long been noted in the literature (Mruk, 1999). This being said, longitudinal studies
are still desirable in helping us to get more sense on the dynamics between WSC and work
outcomes. In addition, because the WSC model is specified as an aggregate model, we cannot
determine its internal consistency reliability. It is important that future studies get test-retest
reliability of the measure through longitudinal design.
Finally, we call for studies that investigate the organizational antecedents of WSC.
Psychologists generally accept that the self-concept is relatively stable but changeable.
Considering the fact that work and organizational experience constitute an important domain of
people’s lives, it is reasonable to expect that the organization shapes individual’s self-concepts,
through affecting the elements of WSC. If future research establishes the impact of
organizational practices and characteristics in shaping employees’ WSC, that would be a strong
demonstration of the utility of WSC in studying organizational behavior and its important
implications on management practices.
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39
Role
Employee
Colleague
Supervisor
Subordinate
Group member
Occupation
TABLE 1
The Organization-based Role-set Developed in Study 1
Referent of Role
Role expectations
(examples)
Organization as a whole
Commitment, performance,
citizenship behavior, etc.
Other members in the
Being cooperative, supportive,
organization
friendly, etc.
Subordinate(s)
Being supportive, leading, caring, etc.
Supervisor
Following command, loyalty, etc.
Other members in group
Being cooperative, contribution to
group task, etc.
Occupational group
Performance, meeting occupational
standards, developing occupational
skills, etc.
40
Variable
1. Age
2. Gender (1=M; 2=F)
3. Education
4. Organization tenure
5. Job tenure
6. General self-efficacy
7. Core self evaluations
8. OBSE
9. WSC
10. Job satisfaction
a
n = 111
* p < .05
** p < .01
Mean
32.21
1.28
4.23
84.89
41.35
5.59
4.56
4.926
213.58
4.42
TABLE 2
Correlations among variables of Study Twoa
S.D.
1
2
3
4
5
6
4.17
-.45
-.31**
-.47
-.15
.10
-44.60 .33**
-.07
-.04
-30.90
.15
.08
-.16 .46**
-(.93)
.78
-.02
.06
.07
-.04
-.13
.58
.04
-.07
-.03
-.01
-.11 .58**
.93
.19
-.03
.02
.02
-.12 .63**
63.74 .25*
-.15
.08
.18
.01
.51**
.93
.06
-.08
.03
.02
-.17 .30**
7
8
9
10
(.70)
.45**
.40**
.16
(.92)
.57**
.41**
-.43**
(.85)
41
Age
Gender (1=M; 2=F)
Education
Organization tenure
Job tenure
TABLE 3
Results of Hierarchical Regression with Job Satisfaction of Study Twoa
Job Satisfaction
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Model 8 Model 9 Model 10
.04
-.06
.03
-.06
.03
-.06
-.04
-.08
-.04
-.09
-.10
-.06
-.10
-.06
-.09
-.06
-.11
-.07
-.12
-.08
.01
-.04
.00
-.04
.01
-.04
.01
-.03
-.00
-.04
.12
.07
.12
.08
.12
.07
.11
.08
.11
.08
+
+
+
+
+
+
-.22
-.20
-.20
-.20
-.21
-.21
-.16
-.17
-.17
-.18+
General self-efficacy
.24*
.03
Core self evaluations
.08
-.09
OBSE
.37**
WSC
∆R2
∆F
Adjusted model R2
a
n = 111
+
p < .10
* p < .05
** p < .01
.43**
.06
1.07
.00
.17**
18.82**
.17
.41**
.06*
5.58*
.05
.11**
12.39**
.16
.46**
.01
.63
.00
.17**
18.77**
.17
.20+
.06
-.02
-.11
-.14
.38**
.25+
.31**
.13**
14.46**
.13
.06**
6.86**
.19
.35**
.14**
5.04**
.12
.07**
7.88**
.19
42
TABLE 4
Correlations among variables of Study Threea
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Variable
Mean S.D
8
9
10
11
12
1. Age
28.30 7.73
2. Gender (1=M; 2=F)
1.55 0.50 -.15*
3. Education
3.59 1.07 -0.10 -0.10
4. Organization tenure 43.76 46.20 .46** 0.01 -0.11
5. Job tenure
29.12 29.55 .38** 0.05 -.28** .67**
6. General
self-efficacy
4.90 0.86 0.06 0.00
0.11 0.12 -0.07 (.92)
7. OBSE
4.45 0.95 .21** -0.03
0.07 .15* 0.08 .53** (.93)
8. WSC
166.99 65.43 0.00 0.05
.14* 0.09 -0.06 .52** .50**
9. Job satisfaction
4.64 0.97 .14* 0.06
0.01 0.06 0.04 .52** .53** .53** (.86)
10. Career satisfaction
4.39 1.09 0.13 0.12
0.03 0.09 0.02 .59** .64** .54** .71** (.91)
3.61 0.58 0.01 0.05 -0.01 0.09 0.04 .37** .17* .31** .33** .29** (.92)
11. Job performances
12. interpersonal
Cooperationc
4.86 0.83 -0.06 0.05
0.06 0.00 -0.06 .26** .18** .30** .27** .27** .35** (.93)
a
n = 201
s
Supervisor rating
c
Coworker rating
* p < .05
** p < .01
43
Age
Gender (1=M;
2=F)
Education
Organization
tenure
Job tenure
General
self-efficacy
OBSE
WSC
TABLE 5
Results of the Regression Analyses of Study Threea
Job Satisfaction
Career Satisfaction
Job Performances
Model Model
Model
Model Model
Model Model Model
Model
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Cooperativenessc
Model Model Model
10
11
12
0.13
0.08
0.11
0.11
0.04
0.05
-0.05
-0.05
-0.03
-0.11
-0.12
-0.10
0.07
0.06
0.05
0.14
0.13*
0.12*
0.05
0.04
0.03
0.04
0.04
0.03
0.04
-0.02
-0.04
0.04
-0.03
-0.05
0.02
-0.01
-0.02
0.05
0.03
0.01
0.10
-0.05
-0.10
0.16
-0.03
-0.06
0.19 +
0.08
0.06
0.19 +
0.12
0.09
-0.07
0.06
0.09
-0.15
-0.01
0.02
-0.09
0.02
0.04
-0.11
-0.03
-0.01
0.38**
0.27**
0.39**
0.33**
0.42**
0.35**
0.27**
0.20*
0.30**
0.21**
0.42**
0.37**
-0.05
-0.11
0.03
-0.02
0.29**
0.03
0.32** 0.06** 0.05
∆R2
1.05
41.66** 15.64** 1.63
∆F
Adjusted
0.00
0.32
0.37
0.02
model R2
a
N = 201
s
Supervisor rating;
c
Coworker rating
+ p < .10; * p < .05; ** p < .01
0.18**
0.18*
0.19*
0.46** 0.02**
80.61** 7.51**
0.02
0.73
0.14** 0.02*
14.58** 4.21*
0.03
1.10
0.08**
7.48**
0.02*
4.65*
0.49
-0.01
0.13
0.00
0.07
0.09
0.51
0.15
44
NOTE:
1. An extensive review of the literatures resulted in three frameworks about work-related roles
that are relevant. One notable effort is found in research on role performance. Noticing the
critical job and organizational changes in recent decades, researchers emphasized work roles as
the fundamental structural components of organizations and developed the concept of role
performance (Murphy & Jackson, 1999). Welbourne, Johnson, and Erez (1998), drawing on role
theory and identity theory, developed a multidimensional measure of role performance that
includes five role domains. The first two roles are what conventional job performance models
cover—the job and organization roles. The third role is the career role that involves obtaining
the necessary skills to progress through one’s organization and career. The team role is another
additional work role that requires employees working well with other team members. Finally,
they also included the innovator role, which implies that employees need to come up with
creative ideas and behave innovatively. There are two other frameworks in the literature that
might be relevant to organization-based role-sets. One is the work-role identification framework
proposed by the Meaning of Work (MOW) International Research Team framework (1987),
which included six work roles – task, company, product/service, co-workers, occupations, and
money. Besides, researchers arguing for the multiple foci of organizational identification
proposed various targets of employee’s identification, such as own career, work unit,
organization, and occupation (e.g., Van Dick et al., 2005) Although these frameworks all covered
some work-related roles, the ways that they were developed are not clearly discussed. None of
them seem to have solid theoretical foundations or rigorous validation evidence. In fact, the
authors using these frameworks do not argue that their frameworks are intended to capture the
multiple roles that an individual could have at work and in organizations. Therefore, in this study,
we use these frameworks as initial starting point to develop an organization-based role-set.
45
APPENDIX
Workplace Self-concept Measure
Role identification (Items are randomized in the questionnaire.):
The employee role
I often tell others that I am an employee of my organization.
I use ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ when I mention my organization to others.
I feel close to other members of my organization.
In my work, I often think of ‘I am an employee of xx (name of your work organization)’, when I
say or do something.
In many situations, I think of myself as an employee of my organization.
The colleague role
I often mention my colleagues to others.
When I mention my colleagues to others, I usually say “we” rather than “they”.
I feel close to my colleagues.
In my work, I often think about things from the perspective of my role as a colleague.
In many situations, I think of myself as a colleague of my coworkers.
The supervisor role
I often think of my subordinates in my work.
In my work, I am often aware that I am a supervisor of my subordinate(s).
I feel close to those who are in supervisor positions as I am in my organization.
In my work, I often think about things from the perspective of my role as a supervisor of my
subordinate(s).
In many situations, I think of myself as a supervisor of my subordinate(s).
The subordinate role
I often think of my supervisor in my work.
In my work, I am often aware that I am a subordinate of my supervisor.
I feel close to those who are in subordinate positions as I am in my organization.
In my work, I often think about things from the perspective of my role as a subordinate of my
supervisor.
In many situations, I think of myself as a subordinate of my supervisor.
The group member role
I often think of my group/team in my work.
I use ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ when I mention my group/team to others.
I feel close to my group/team members.
In my work, I often think about things from the perspective of my role as a group/team member.
In many situations, I think of myself as a member of my group/team.
The occupation role
I often mention my occupation to others (e.g., “I am an accountant/engineer”, etc.).
I often think of my occupation role in my work.
I feel close to people who are in the same occupation as me.
In my work, I often think about things from the perspective of my occupation role
In many situations, I think of myself as my professional/occupational role (e.g., as an
accountant/engineer, etc.)
46
Role specific self-evaluation (Items are listed together as below in the questionnaire.):
We have various roles in our work. These work-related roles have different expectations to
us. For example, as an employee, we are supposed to follow the rules of the organization; as
a colleague, we are supposed to be cooperative. We have different performances in these
different roles. In the following, please think about these roles you have at work, and rate
yourself according to your own understanding and your performance in each role.
How do I perform in this role?
(Rated each role using 1 - 10
My roles at work…
points being the maximum. If
some role is completely irrelevant
to you, please fill in “0”.)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
How would you rate yourself as an employee of your
organization?
How would you rate yourself as a colleague?
How would you rate yourself as a supervisor?
How would you rate yourself as a subordinator?
How would you rate yourself as a group/team
member? (“group/team” refers to any groups, teams,
or units that you are in or have ever been attended, in
which you work with other members for a job task,
e.g., a project team).
As to your occupation role, how would you rate
yourself (e.g., rate yourself as an accountant/an
engineer, etc)?
___________________
___________________
___________________
___________________
___________________
___________________