Psychological well-being of employees working for business organizations with a normative organizational identity

Organizational identity – i.e. the employees’ shared perception about their organization’s central, distinctive, and enduring qualities – has important effects on employee well-being. Specifically, business organizations are characterized by an instrumental organizational identity, which intends organizational effectiveness as shareholders’ value maximization; this identity, in some cases, coexists with a normative organizational identity, which intends organizational effectiveness as stakeholders’ value maximization. The paper, based on a survey on a sample of 185 HR managers and professionals in 8 European countries developed in collaboration with the leading European HR Professional Association, empirically analyzes the effects of this coexistence on employees’ psychological well-being, focusing on emotional exhaustion. The extant literature has explored organizational identity mostly by looking at its association with well-being dimensions different from psychological well-being. . Valuing the idea that employee well-being is multidimensional construct, our results extend extant literature on the effects of normative organizational identity on employees’ well-being. Specific practical implications of the findings are presented, based on the idea that a normative organizational identity constitutes, within business organizations, not only a resource which have positive effects on certain well-being dimensions such as job satisfaction or engagement (which previous literature has shown), but also new demands which could undermine employee psychological well-being.