| Abstract [eng] |
The peculiarities of employee reactions to negative information about their organization Summary Modern organizations put much effort in creating their image, which is one of the intangible resources helping to acquire competitive advantage. Caillouet and Allen (1996) claim that employees are unofficial representatives of the organizations who by unofficial conversations in their environment communicate certain information, which can influence organization’s image in their community. During reputation crisis, which can happen to any organization it is essentially, important that organization would control the information about itself, spreading in it’s environment. Theories of social identification and responsibility through global association explain why employees are motivated to explain the actions of their organization and to defend it. Based on the fact that because of organizational identification employees perceive organizational critics as personal (Ashforth and Mael, 1989), the assumption that employees use ego defense mechanisms when react to negative information about the organization is followed in this work. The research was made in the Bank of Lithuania in order to find out which ways employees use for reacting to negative information about their organization and to test if the usage of such ways is related to the variables which are suggested in this work (perceived organizational prestige, organizational identification and belonging to main or supporting divisions of organization) chosen with reference to social identification and responsibility through global association theories. 73 employees from 5 divisions of the Bank of Lithuania participated in the research, which was made by questionnaire survey. The scales of perceived organizational prestige and organizational identification (Mael and Ashforth, 1992) and five fragments from real media reports about Euro introduction where negative information about the Bank of Lithuania is presented were included in the questionnaire. According to the results, organizational identification and perceived organizational prestige are correlated. These two constructs are also related to such ways of defense as blaming journalists and other organizations, anger, denial of information and organizational justification but not related to rationalization of organizational actions. On the contrary to one of the hypothesis, employees who belong to main divisions were less tend to agree with statements, which reflect such ways of defense as rationalization and blaming journalists than their colleagues who belong to supportive divisions. |
