What we share is who we are and what we do: how emotional intimacy shapes organizational identification and collaborative behaviors

We focus on the concept of emotional intimacy among organizational members and investigate its influence on both their (a) perceptions and (b) behaviors. With regard to employees’ perceptions, we test whether it is organizational identification (operationalized as cognitive and affective identification with the organization) that influences emotional intimacy or the reverse. At the behavioral level, we investigate the interplay between employee emotional intimacy and organizational identification and their effects on employee interpersonal helping (OCB-Is; interpersonal organizational citizenship behaviors) and interpersonal conflict (CWB-Is; interpersonal counterproductive workplace behaviors). Based on a three-wave panel study among nurses working in a public hospital, our findings show that emotional intimacy influences organizational identification, and it represents a unique antecedent of OCB-Is and CWB-Is.