Aubrey Kent

Challenge Is Key: An Investigation of Affective Organizational Commitment in Undergraduate Interns

In this study, the authors investigated factors related to affective organizational commitment in undergraduate interns. They examined job challenge, supervisor support, and role stress as antecedents to commitment. Results based on a sample of senior undergraduate students (N = 71) showed that the 3 work variables explained 35% of the variance in affective organizational commitment. The authors discuss implications for educators and managers in charge of designing and implementing quality internships.

A social identity perspective on the job attitudes of employees in sport

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a foundation for future research pertaining to establishing the distinctness of the sport industry from an employee psychology perspective.Design/methodology/approach – This conceptual paper is rooted in social identity theory which maintains that certain levels of self‐esteem and psychological fulfillment can be derived from ones membership in particular groups. The authors have developed a model of positive social identity in sport organizations that details the benefits and consequences of psychological fulfillment related to employment in the sport industry.Findings – Within the proposed model, the paper outlines how particular elements of social identity derived from ones employment in sport may play an active role in particular job attitudes by enhancing the employees self‐esteem and contributing to overall self‐evaluation. It further explains how social identity in the workplace may influence individual outcomes such as organizational citizenship...

Fandom in the Workplace: Multi-Target Identification in Professional Team Sports

Team identification has been researched extensively from the perspective of the consumer. The current study proposes that employees working in professional sport may also be fans of their respective teams, and provides insight on the role of team identification in the workplace environment. Over 1100 business operations employees from the top profession sports leagues in North America participated, and results indicate that dual targets of identification exist simultaneously in this setting. Strong support is provided for the discriminant validity between organizational and team identification. Beyond the more established effects of organizational identification, the results provide evidence that team identification independently predicts key outcomes such as commitment, satisfaction, and motivation. The results add to the literature by introducing the concept of a sports team as an additional target of identification in the organizational context.