Employees’ Organizational Solidarity within Modern Organizations: A Framing Perspective on the Effects of Social Embeddedness

Abstract

(from the chapter) The focus of our study is on how embeddedness affects the solidary behavior of employees with regard to their organization. We look at a range of available empirical studies and examine to what extent their results are consistent with the framing perspective on solidarity proposed in this book (cf. Lindenberg, 1998 and this volume; Lindenberg et al., this volume). Furthermore, we aim to determine whether relational framing provides better explanations or generates new fruitful research problems in comparison with competing approaches to organizational embeddedness. We pay particular attention to agency theory (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972; Petersen, 1993) as a prominent competing approach that excludes the cognitive and emotional mechanisms of framing. We give a brief outline of the core assumptions of both theories. The effects of institutional embeddedness on solidary behavior within an organization will then be discussed and attention will be paid to the relationships between employees' solidary behavior and network and temporal embeddedness. In the last section, we will summarize and present some ideas for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)