A meta-analytic investigation of the organizational identification – Job performance relationship in the frontlines

Organizational identification (OI) – which is defined as a sense of oneness with the organization – has consistently been found to increase frontline employee (FLE) job performance. However, whether these performance gains are uniform across different types of frontline jobs (e.g., retail clerks vs. financial advisors) and performance outcomes (e.g., behavioral vs. financial) has yet to be determined. Consequently, frontline managers lack the guidance necessary to decide whether or when they should prioritize investments in OI as a mechanism for achieving organizational performance goals. We begin to redress this knowledge gap through a meta-analytic investigation of the OI-FLE performance relationship, which reveals: (a) an overall positive effect of OI on FLE job performance, (b) job meaningfulness (i.e., job autonomy, skill variety and task significance) weakens the OI-FLE job performance relationship, and (c) this weakening is more pronounced in the case of behavioral and customer (but not financial) performance outcomes. Our study findings thus suggest retail managers should prioritize investments in OI when their goal is to promote desirable FLE behaviors and in situations where the work cannot be made meaningful due to job design constraints (e.g., when providing FLEs autonomy is not possible because the work must be performed in a prespecified manner at a predetermined time).