Knowledge workers’ identities at the beginning of their professional development: Evidence from the medical profession

- Knowledge Workers’ Identities at the Beginning of their Professional Development: Evidence from the Medical Profession.
- Therefore, we distinguish between professional workers’ organizational and professional identification.
- Organizational identification is considered as a powerful construct having the potential to influence organizational behaviour.
- This concept was examined both in profit and non-profit organizations and proven to be a powerful predictor of various job-related attitudes and outcomes.
- Although the professional workforce and knowledge-based workers are becoming more important in the global knowledge economy, the concept of professional identification has been understudied in social identification literature.
- Given that the identification is a dynamic process, especially intriguing is the question of how organizational and professional identities interact at different stages in a professional workers’ career.
- The purpose of this paper is to examine the organizational and professional identities of knowledge workers at the beginning of their professional development.
- Organizational and professional identification have been relatively understudied in the university context and this paper tends to fill the literature gap by examining individual and group- level antecedents to identification with the university and medical profession.
- Consistent with the previous studies, our results indicate that levels of organizational and professional identification are correlated.
- Furthermore, our results show that knowledge workers experience a stronger sense of belonging to their profession at the beginning of their professional development.
- Keywords: knowledge workers, medical profession, organizational identification, professional identification.
- Organizational identification is considered to be a powerful construct having the potential to influence organizational behaviour.
- This concept was examined both in profit and non- profit organizations and proven to be a powerful predictor of various job-related attitudes and outcomes [17].
- This remains the case despite professional identification was confirmed as an antecedent to outcomes such as organizational commitment and job satisfaction [15]..
- Given that the identification is a dynamic process, especially intriguing is the question of how organizational and professional identities interact at different stages in a professional workers’ career..
- Medical doctors are considered to be highly professional occupations and therefore represent a particularly insightful area for gaining a deeper understanding of this subject.
- This paper aims to contribute to the literature on organizational identification by providing empirical evidence on the antecedents and the relationship between organizational and professional identification of medical students.
- The structure of the paper is as follows.
- First, we provide a theoretical background on the concepts of organizational and professional identification, particularly focusing on the interdependent nature of their relationship, as noted in the previous studies.
- Then we present findings of an empirical study using a sample of medical students of the largest and oldest medical school in Croatia.
- In the final section, the implications for higher education institutions are discussed..
- Organizational identification has long been in the focus of organizational behaviour scholars and among the firsts to define this concept were Ashforth &.
- Drawing on the social identity theory, organizational identification is defined as the perception of oneness with or belongingness to a group [1].
- Social identity theory remains one of the most dominant approaches to the study of organizational identification, represented among some of the most influential studies in the field .
- Organizational identification represents the underlying bond between an individual and his organization as it was demonstrated to be related to numerous important organizational outcomes such as job involvement, employee performance and turnover rates .
- In the context of non-profit organizations, organizational identification proved to be related to leadership practices [3], perceived organizational image [21], loyalty [2] and philanthropic behaviour [19]..
- Somewhat the understudied form of identification is professional identification which refers to the extent to which a person experiences a sense of belongingness to his profession and recognizes themselves in their professional values [7]..
- Even though professional identification has been less examined compared to other identification profiles, it is considered to be an important construct having the potential to influence knowledge workers’ job-related behaviours [15].
- Previous studies confirmed that organizational and professional identifications are correlated [7], [24].
- Examining employees of a daily newspaper company, Russo [23] demonstrated that journalists identify more with their profession than with the companies they work for.
- However, her results further demonstrated that organizational identification is a better predictor of job satisfaction.
- Further, levels of professional and organizational identification are confirmed to be a predictor of the adaptation of new work behaviours, namely medical doctors are found to be willing to adopt new work behaviour when they are weakly identified with their profession and strongly identified with their employing organization [9].
- Studies on organizational and professional identification are usually set within the corporate environment and only a small proportion of authors examined identification among the university students.
- For most professionals, feeling of belongingness to their profession is expected to emerge in schools when they are first familiarized with the profession’s norms and attributes and it is expected to evolve through different career stages [15]..
- Given that identification in the early stages of professional development has been understudied in previous literature this paper aims to examine which factors contribute to a strong identification with university and profession among medical students, as well as whether there are differences between these two forms of identification.
- Our first assumption is that the level of professional identification among medical students is higher than the level of organizational identification.
- We support this claim by the fact that higher levels of professional identification have been confirmed within professionals in advanced career stages as well.
- In line with the call for a further investigation of identification antecedents in different organizational settings [22], we examined two sets of identification antecedents: (1) organization-level antecedents and (2) individual-level antecedents.
- As s strong organization level antecedent, we propose student satisfaction with the university (school).
- We assume that the level of satisfaction with the university has the potential to influence the intensity of both organizational and professional identification, namely that level of satisfaction is positively related to both forms of identification.
- Questionnaires were distributed to students of the largest Croatian public medicine school ‒ Zagreb school of Medicine, University of Zagreb, and data collection took place during December 2018.
- Organizational and professional identification (OID &.
- Students expressed their level of satisfaction with the following attributes: (1) teaching staff friendliness, (2) teaching stuff approachability, (3) teaching staff competencies, (4) overall friendliness of the school’s environment, and (5) quality of school’s classrooms and equipment.
- The majority of our respondents were born in the city where the medical school is located (51,3.
- Most of the respondents had a GPA ranging from 3,6 to 4,0 (26,2.
- On average, the respondents spent 24,4 hours per week studying while 32,3% of them regularly studied in the school’s library.
- In the past academic year, 68,82% of our respondents attended at least one workshop, lecture or conference outside the school’s curriculum, and 70,3% of them were regularly engaged in some kind of physical activity in their spare time.
- The majority of the respondents from the sample (63,8%) spend 4-6 hours in school facilities per day, and 69,2% volunteered in student associations or worked as student assistants.
- In total, 65,23% of our respondents considered themselves to be successful above the average..
- Table 1 presents the descriptive for the key variables in the analysis..
- The results indicated to higher intensity of professional compared to organizational identification..
- The Pearson correlation coefficient indicated a moderate correlation between organizational and professional identification (r=,273.
- The results also showed that student satisfaction is weakly correlated to both organizational and (r=,273.
- p<0,01) professional identification (r=,155;.
- 95% Confidence Interval of the Difference.
- The results showed that there were no differences in the intensity of organizational and professional identification considering respondents’ demographic characteristics (age and gender), university tenure, academic success, time spent at university facilities, learning efforts, and membership in student associations.
- Investing time in professional development proved to be the only statistically significant identification predictor.
- Table 4 shows the identification scores for the groups of the respondents concerning their professional development activities..
- Our results showed that there is a statistically significant difference in professional identification among students who have invested their time in professional development activities (M=3,349;.
- However, the same was not the case for organizational identification..
- Such a relationship can be explained by the fact that, in highly specialized occupations, identification with the organization stems from the extent to which the organization can provide members with the opportunity to develop professionally [12]..
- Furthermore, the results indicate that medical students identify more with the medical profession than with the medical school which leads to the conclusion that knowledge workers feel a strong commitment to their profession even before they start their professional careers..
- The results indicate that student satisfaction was shown to be correlated to both forms of identification.
- who demonstrated that alumni identify more strongly with the university when they are more satisfied with how their study expectations were met.
- Contrary to expected, most of the proposed individual-level antecedents didn’t significantly influence identification levels.
- Investing time in professional development was shown to be an important identification predictor and students who participated in activities intended for additional.
- Further, levels of organizational and professional identification were obtained based on the cross- sectional data and therefore we were not able to capture the dynamic nature of these constructs.
- Aiming to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between organizational and professional identification, we left some questions unanswered but also generated several new ones to be considered.
- First, to overcome some of the encountered limitations we call for future researchers to use longitudinal studies and more diverse samples (e.g., different professions).
- Also, a more complete understanding of the observed phenomenon could be achieved by applying adequate qualitative research methods.
- Regardless of the aforementioned limitations, this study adds to the literature on organizational and professional identification in several ways.
- Firstly, the study provides empirical evidence on the relationship between organizational &.
- professional identification of collage students which was neglected in previous studies.
- This is an important finding that contributes to a better understanding of the university-student relationship.
- The current study advances our understanding of organizational and professional identification of knowledge workers.
- The major findings of this study are that the intensity of organizational and professional identification differs significantly among medical professionals at the beginning of their professional development.
- Thus, our study contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between universities and students.
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