题　目：Organizational identification and decoupling

嘉　宾：Wang Yihua, PhD candidate, London Business School

主　持：王薇, 助理教授, 上海交通大学

时　间：2026年10月21日（周三）10:00-11:30

地　点：上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院 包兆龙图书馆 A305室

内容简介:

We explore why organizations fail to implement policies they have formally adopted, even when they are under strong external legitimacy pressure to do so. Traditional accounts treat policy-practice decoupling as a deliberate, top-down strategy in which leaders adopt symbolic policies while leaving practice unchanged. We propose a psychological mechanism centered on organizational identification: external legitimacy pressure motivates implementation only when employees identify with the organization whose legitimacy is at stake. Because organizational identification is systematically higher among senior leaders than lower-ranking employees, policies adopted at the top may be only partially implemented at lower levels, resulting in a bottom-up form of policy-practice decoupling. We test our theory using a large-scale archival study of 17,002 firm-years, and introduce a scalable, text-based proxy of aggregate organizational identification derived from employee reviews. We then strengthen causal inference in two preregistered experiments using both behavioral and attitudinal outcomes. We formalize the theory and results in a mathematical model that sets out directions for future research. Consistent with our theory, higher-ranking members identify more strongly, and identification translates into implementation effort only when legitimacy pressure is high.

演讲人简介：

I am a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at London Business School. I hold a BA and an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge and previously worked in economic consulting at Oxera.My research agenda examines how individual psychological processes and interpersonal dynamics produce collective outcomes, such as organizational decoupling and polarization, and how these outcomes in turn shape individual behavior. I am particularly interested in how organizational identification shapes employees’ responses to external pressure and their willingness to implement organizational policies. My job market paper examines how differences in organizational identification between leaders and employees can lead to the emergence of gaps between organizational policies and practices, even when leaders intend those policies to be fully implemented.I study these questions using formal theory, computational models, experiments, and archival data. I also use natural language processing and generative AI to develop measures of organizational identification from employee reviews.

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