Identity and commitment in emergency teams

This paper adopts Tajfel's social identity theory perspective and applies it to the organizational context in order to study emergency intervention teams. Specifically, it is intended to explore the kind of social identification (professional, team, or organizational) prevalent among members of these organizations. It is intended, as well, to establish a clear distinction between two related, and often confused, concepts, i.e., organizational identification and commitment, and to discover which identification is more apt to predict the organizational outcomes of organizational citizenship behaviors and satisfaction. Our total sample consisted of 151 participants (firemen of the Madrid municipality and members of the army). It was found that organizational identification, as a kind of social identification, is different from organizational commitment, and that it is not its base nor one of its components, and that organizational identification, much as professional one, helps to explain peoples' behavior in organizations.