Too-much-of-a-good-thing? The curvilinear relation between identification, overcommitment, and employee well-being

Organizational identification reflects the link between employees and their organization and it has been consistently found positively related to employee health and well-being (Steffens et al. 2017). However, recent reviews and initial empirical evidence questioned the assumption of a uniform linear relation. We propose a mediation model, in which identification will be non-linearly related to changes in overcommitment over time, which in turn, will be related to employee psychological distress and job burnout. We tested the potential adverse effect of over-identification in a two-wave study (N = 85) across 18 months of both blue-collar and white-collar employees in an Italian manufacturing firm. The results confirmed our hypotheses and revealed a curvilinear effect of identification on overcommitment as well as indirect effects for health and burnout. We outline implications for theory in the form of the too-much-of-a-good-thing notion, and we discuss practical implications for managers who should be conscious of these effects when designing interventions to increase identification.