To be or not to be...identified. Explorations of students' (dis)identification in a Romanian University

Abstract

The paper explores the way in which contextual and dispositional factors impact on students’ development of identification and disidentification. We investigate these relations in one cross-sectional and one longitudinal study. The results indicate that need for identification moderates the impact of contextual variables upon disidentification and the transformation of ambivalent identification into disidentification. Based on these findings, the proposed guidelines for building an effective strategy to foster students’ identification with their university follow two lines. The first one refers to the differential impact of policies on students, depending on their need for identification and initial level of organizational identification. The second targets the manipulation in strategy making of organizational level factors affecting identification, such as the incongruence of the organization’s identity and organizational prestige.