Are you a good member of our organization? Multiple identifications, prototipicality assessment, and the transfer of work practices

This paper investigates how multiple salient work-related identities influence the way highly identified individuals appraise their coworkers’ degree of prototypicality with the primary target of identification and, as a consequence, their willingness to engage in extra-role behaviors toward prototypical members. Through a field study in a hospital unit where members belonging to four different professional groups (doctors, technicians, physicists, and nurses) operate jointly, we show that when both organizational and professional identities are salient, highly identified individuals, while complying with the prototype of the most salient identity—in this case the organization—are also influenced by the prototypical behaviors of their professional identity. This interplay leads to the development of different priorities of prototypical behaviors with the primary target for different professionals such that behaviors of the organizational prototype that acquire most relevance are those overlapping with the core prototypic behaviors of the professional prototype. Professional prototypes therefore act as ‘prisms’ through which organizational prototypes are interpreted and coworkers evaluated. Our findings show that only coworkers perceived as prototypical become worthy recipients of extra-role behaviors. Specifically, the extra-role behaviors we observed include practice sharing between members of different professional groups. More generally, the study contributes to research on multiple identities and the outcomes that their interplay generates as well as to research on the role of interpersonal dynamics in identification processes within organizational contexts.