Organizational Identification Scale

Identification is self-definitional: it is the degree to which people define themselves through the organization and experience its fate as their own. Commitment, especially affective commitment, is attitudinal: it is how favorably people feel toward the organization and how willing they are to stay. Ashforth and Mael stressed that identification answers 'who am I?' while commitment reflects an attitude and a sense of exchange or obligation. The distinction has practical consequences: a person can be highly identified yet dissatisfied, or committed for instrumental reasons without much identification. The Mael and Ashforth scale was deliberately written to capture oneness rather than liking or intention to remain, preserving this difference.

Its items tap perceived oneness with and belonging to the organization — for example, whether the organization's successes feel like one's own successes, whether criticism of the organization feels like a personal insult, and whether one describes oneself in terms of membership. These items capture the cognitive merging of self and organization rather than satisfaction or intent to stay. Mael and Ashforth validated them as forming an essentially unidimensional measure, so the items are combined into a single identification score. The deliberate exclusion of satisfaction and turnover-intention content is what keeps the scale measuring identification specifically rather than adjacent constructs.

Yes. The basic Mael and Ashforth scale measures the strength of positive identification, but later work recognized more complex forms: disidentification, where people define themselves as not the organization; ambivalent identification, where they identify and disidentify at once; and over-identification, where the boundary between self and organization collapses unhealthily. People also identify with multiple foci — workgroup, profession, organization — simultaneously. The standard scale does not capture these nuances, so researchers studying them use extended or adapted measures. For most purposes, however, the original scale's focus on the degree of positive identification remains the workhorse measure in the field.