Becoming Who We Serve: A Model of Multi-Layered Employee–Customer Identification
研究了员工对顾客的多层次认同如何形成及其影响，发现组织实践使员工变得像顾客而非相反，这种认同包含非工作身份和不同包容性水平的身份。
Though employee identification with customers has received little explicit attention in organizational scholarship, and has only recently emerged as an area of focus in marketing, research suggests that customers should play a central role in the identity dynamics of employees. What makes employee–customer identification different from other forms of identification (e.g., employee–organization and customer–organization identification) is that although the organization may be the conduit for identification to occur, it may not be the focus of identification. Indeed, in the organization we explore here, organizational practices lead employees to identify with customers, but to do so in such a way that employees become—at least in part—more like “who they served” than vice versa. Moreover, the bonds we find between employees and customers are multilayered, incorporating nonwork identities, as well as identities at different levels of inclusiveness (e.g., collective and role). This paper explores and models the development and consequences of multilayered employee–customer identification, argues for its theoretical and practical implications, and suggests avenues for future research.