Organizational identification as a trigger for personal well-being: Associations with happiness and stress through job outcomes

Recent literature highlights that well-being, happiness, as well as personal stress, has become important for guiding public policy in areas that might involve suboptimal behaviour. Positive life outcomes can extend from one field of life (family, work, sport, children, hobbies, etc.) to another, multiplying success, performance, and health. In the present study, we aimed to verify whether the positive relation between organizational identification and employees' experiences then extends also into a positive association with more general well-being that is unrelated to the work context. For this purpose, we considered two proxies of organizational well-being: job satisfaction (on the positive side) and turnover intention (on the negative side) as well as the distal associations with happiness. The study involved 305 workers who completed a questionnaire made up of five scales: organization identification, job satisfaction, turn-over intention, happiness, and personal stress. We found that organizational identification is positively related to employees' job satisfaction and negatively related to their intention to leave. Afterwards, job satisfaction and turnover

study, we aimed to verify whether the positive relation between organizational identification and employees' experiences then extends also into a positive association with more general well-being that is unrelated to the work context. For this purpose, we considered two proxies of organizational well-being: job satisfaction (on the positive side) and turnover intention (on the negative side) as well as the distal associations with happiness. The study involved 305 workers who completed a questionnaire made up of five scales: organization identification, job satisfaction, turnover intention, happiness, and personal stress. We found that organizational identification is positively related to employees' job satisfaction and negatively related to their intention to leave. Afterwards, job satisfaction and turnover intention were related to personal stress and happiness, suggesting a positive effect of organizational identification above and beyond the work context.

K E Y W O R D S
happiness, organizational identification, stress, work outcomes

| INTRODUCTION
Happiness, as well as other indicators of well-being and stress, has become a major topic in public policy, economics, and psychology in the last decades. Happiness and stress at work have been recognized today as issues of institutional, governmental, academic, and applied relevance, and this has led to a proliferation of practices, policies, and strategies for the improvement of work environments and working conditions, training, and empowerment programs (Ramirez Salazar, 2021;Thompson & Bruk-Lee, 2021). Certifications and awards have been developed for years regarding the happy or stress-controlled company (Lee & Yoon, 2020).
The global experiences that arise from the set of perceptions relating to the quality of our life are often referred to as well-being, flourishing, happiness, and life satisfaction (Suardi, Sotgiu, Costa, Cauda, & Rusconi, 2016); they can refer to the different social contexts of personal fulfilment. A large part of a person's life is devoted to working and happy workers are also less stressed (Tandler, Krauss, & Proyer, 2020), with higher levels of positive emotions (and less negative; Fitriana, Hutagalung, Awang, & Zaid, 2022;Paakkanen, Martela, & Pessi, 2021), and more satisfied about their life. Importantly, positive life outcomes can extend from one field of life (family, work, sport, children, hobbies, etc.) to another, this way multiplying personal success and performance (Oswald, Proto, & Sgroi, 2015;Silva Munar, De Juana-Espinosa, Martínez-Buelvas, Vecchiola Abarca, & Orellana Tirado, 2020).
We spend a large part of our daily social life in the workplace and the set of relationships that we develop allow us to understand the context in which we operate and its values, and to experience it as a functional community to work with which we feel we belong (Haslam, 2004). It is therefore no surprise that research has focused its attention on the theme of organizational identification and its impact on work and life outcomes (Steffens, Haslam, Schuh, Jetten, & van Dick, 2017). If, on the one hand, work outcomes are related to personal well-being, happiness, and stress about one's life in general (intended as indicators of quality of life and health; Ruggeri, Garcia-Garzon, Maguire, Matz, & Huppert, 2020), on the other hand, little is known about the psychological mechanisms by which specific organizational processes (e.g., organizational identification) impact upon personal outcomes through worker's experience.
Thus, research on the effects of organizational identification on general well-being is still underdeveloped, and therefore we aim to test both this association and the possible underlying mediators. For this purpose, we designed a correlational study to verify the association of organizational identification with employees' work outcomes, and to understand whether these latter are then associated with life outcomes (happiness and personal stress): more specifically, given the absence of research that has investigated the role of possible mediators of work outcomes between organizational identification and life outcomes, the study intends to overcome this gap and explore the possible role of mediators of job satisfaction and turnover (among the most used work outcomes in the organizational field) in the relationship between organizational identification (from now on, OI), personal stress, and happiness.

| ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTIFICATION AND ITS OUTCOMES
The importance of social relationship and group belongingness for individuals' material and symbolic outcomes have been considered since the seminal work in social psychology: indeed, preverbal infants already demonstrate pro-social behaviours (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007), and this innate tendency towards sociability leads in turn to the creation of solid working, friendly, and loving relationships that can change our levels of happiness, stress, health, and well-being (Ficarra, Rubino, & Morote, 2020;Helliwell & Aknin, 2018). A massive corpus of studies about individuals and their interaction with social contexts shows the pivotal role of the sense of identity in promoting happiness and well-being, and preventing stress (Kun & Gadanecz, 2022;Steffens et al., 2017).
According to the social identity approach (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), a fundamental part of an individual's identity stems from belongingness to relevant groups, and this impacts individuals' self-esteem, cognitive and affective reactions, as well as behaviours. During the course of their life, people define themselves in terms of uniqueness through the salience of personal characteristics or as members of one or more groups, depending on the specific social context (Ellemers, Pagliaro, & Barreto, 2013;Tajfel & Turner, 1979). In this vein, some authors consider the organizational environment as a context in which a large number of people spend most of their time during their life embodying norms, rules, roles, and consequentially the sense of belongingness (Ashforth & Mael, 1989;Haslam, 2004).
In an influential meta-analysis on the relation between OI and health Steffens et al. (2017) not only provided evidence about the overall social identification-health relationship but also described several boundary conditions for this relation. Among these boundary conditions, for instance, they showed that the target of identification (i.e., whether the workgroup or the organization as a whole) does not moderate the relation between identification and health: that is, identification with both the workgroup and the organization as a whole is related to employees' invigoration rather than being (negatively) related to their exhaustion. In a different vein, the relation between OI and health is more likely to be detected when considering psychological (rather than physical) indicators of health. Steffens et al. significantly contributed to the understanding of the pivotal role of OI in promoting well-being within organizations, which is not trivial considering that employees' stress is not only costly for individuals (in terms of reduced well-being) but also for organizations (in terms of effectiveness and productivity). Therefore, "efforts to promote well-being can have significant benefits at the individual, organizational, and societal levels" (Steffens et al., 2017, p. 303).
Moreover, there is evidence that daily work enjoyment was positively correlated to one's daily well-being (i.e., spill-over effect) which, in turn, can be transmitted to the partner (i.e., cross-over effect; Sanz-Vergel & Rodríguez-Muñoz, 2016), and it is possible to hypothesize that this transfer could also take place in relation to one's colleagues at work. Despite this preliminary evidence, here we try to provide further evidence for the link between organizational identification and well-being, which is still to be consistently explored.
To sum up, the above literature shows on one hand that organizational identification promotes organizational well-being and, on the other, that individual stress could be related to an individual's experience of the work context (Knight & Haslam, 2010;van Dick, van Knippenberg, Kerschreiter, Hertel, & Wieseke, 2008). In the present study, we attempted to examine the possible association of organizational identification with individual outcomes over and above the boundaries of the organization. In particular, we aimed to investigate whether the positive effect of OI on employees' well-being-as described above-further impacts personal stress and happiness. This point deserves to be studied because literature highlights a link between happiness and health (Steptoe, 2019), but to the best of our knowledge, no research focused on the specific link between OI and its association with happiness or stress outside the workplace. Another reason for investigating happiness and stress is the possibility of constructing interventions for their peculiar development and prevention. Psychological interventions useful to improve positive well-being and cultivate happiness are quite different from those used to decrease negative affect (Proyer, Wellenzohn, Gander, & Ruch, 2015). If happiness is protective, then interventions targeting well-being may have a favourable impact on the work environment and the life of workers.
A further relevant novelty of the present research is the potential mediators that could underline the association between organizational identification and personal stress and happiness. In the next section, we advance that classical organizational outcome-that is, turnover intention and satisfaction-may represent such mediators.

| TURNOVER INTENTION AND JOB SATISFACTION AS MEDIATORS
Based on the aforementioned literature, in the present study, we aimed to verify whether the positive effect of organizational identification on employees' organizational experience then spills over into more general well-being that is unrelated to the work context. In particular, we considered two classical indicators of organizational well-being: job satisfaction (on the positive side) and turnover intention (on the negative side). Research so far showed that organizational identification is likely to better the global experience of the work context-that is, the job satisfaction-as well as to foster commitment and loyalty to the organization itself, thus reducing individual willingness to leave the organization-that is, turnover intention (Karanika-Murray, Duncan, Pontes, & Griffiths, 2015;Van Dick et al., 2004;Zhang & Liu, 2016). In the same vein, previous studies suggested that organizational well-being is likely to influence the global experience of life: for instance, researchers interested in work-related stress have considered the extent to which job-related issues are intrusive in daily life (i.e., the so-called work tension: House & Rizzo, 1972; for a review, see Fields, 2002). Therefore, we are inclined to believe that, in the same vein, these classical indicators of work-related well-being should be related to the global individual's well-being as well. That is, whereas stressful organizational context-that diminishes workers' job satisfaction and increases their turnover intentions-are likely to negatively influence an individual's well-being even over and beyond the organizational context, creating a tension that is experienced not only at work but at home as well (House & Rizzo, 1972), we expect the opposite pattern to emerge when the work context is positively experienced. Thus, in line with the literature described, we anticipated a mediation model in which organizational identification is related to the personal being, and this relation is mediated by two classical work outcomes such as job satisfaction and turnover intention (see Figure 1 for the conceptual model; Knight & Aslam, Knight & Haslam, 2010;Haar, Schmitz, Di Fabio, & Daellenbach, 2019).
The relations between organizational identification and the two work outcomes we considered have been already ascertained in the literature: indeed, organizational identification consistently emerged in the literature as positively related to employees' job satisfaction and negatively related to their turnover intention (for a review, see Haslam, 2004;Steffens et al., 2017). Nevertheless, this research considered job satisfaction and turnover intention as outcomes, rather than the possible antecedents for the employees' personal well-being over and beyond the organizational context. In the present research, we tried to overcome this aspect: according to our rationale described above, a better experience in the workplace could relate to an individual's life as a whole (Fitriana et al., 2022;Oswald et al., 2015;Paakkanen et al., 2021;Silva Munar et al., 2020;Tandler et al., 2020). Thus, in the tested mediation model, we considered the positive experience in the workplace-as indicated by high job satisfaction and low turnover intention-as the key underlying mechanisms of the effect of organizational identification on an individual's well-being. And in particular, we operationalized well-being by means of two indicators that are of opposite valence: happiness (on the positive side) and personal stress (on the negative side). According to the aforementioned rationale (Hameed, Ijaz, & Sabharwal, 2021;Li, Fan, & Zhao, 2015;Ugheoke, Mashi, & Isa, 2021), we expected a positive relationship between organizational outcomes and personal well-being.

| THE PRESENT RESEARCH
To test our reasoning, a correlational study was designed and conducted through the dissemination of a survey among real employees in the Italian context.

| Participants and procedure
Employees who work in private and public companies in Italy were selected as the target population. An a priori G* Power Test was performed to determine an adequate sample size by convenience sampling (Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner, & Lang, 2009) for linear multiple regression; an alpha effect size and an alpha error probability of 0.05, a power of 0.80 with 3 predictors were inputted to perform the power analysis test, determining that the minimum sample size of 222 employees was required.
With the aim of improving the generalizability of the results and the objective of best representing the heterogeneity of the workers' population, the sampling method used was snowballing. Workers were recruited by posting a short poll on LinkedIn ("Are you happy at work?") and provided with a link to a Google form to fill in a closed-ended questionnaire. The form was active during 2020 and was able to be completed from February 1 to 29. Workers read and accepted a consent form, instructions for participation, and a declaration on data processing in compliance with current Italian laws (GDPR) and the Helsinki Declaration (WMA, 2013). Participation was anonymous and voluntary, and there was no way of determining where the workers originated from; Google form did track the IPs of participants to ensure that the same participant did not respond more than once.
Three hundred and seventy-two workers participated in the research by completing the questionnaire and the final analysis sample was composed of 305 people actively working (Table 1) who adequately completed the questionnaire (missing less than 5%). Of the 305 Italian workers, 58.7% (n = 179) were female, mostly married (57.2%, n = 174) and with a university degree 56.4% (n = 174). The mean age of the sample was 38.47 years (SD = 10.5), while the mean work seniority was 16.09 years (SD = 10.1). As regards the job sectors, the sample was quite heterogeneous (Table 1).

| Measures
Participants filled out a questionnaire made up of 5 scales and an introductory section to collect socio-demographic data. Common method variance and method biases were limited to procedures suggested in the literature (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, & Lee, 2003): the different scales were randomly inserted into the questionnaire and graphically separated from each other, and various scale formats and endpoints were utilized for each of the measured variables.

F I G U R E 1 Conceptual model
Organizational Identification was measured with a six-item Italian adaptation (Manuti & Bosco, 2012) of the organizational identification scale developed by Mael and Ashforth (1992), rated on a response scale ranging from 0 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree; e.g., "When someone criticizes my organization, it feels like a personal insult"; Cronbach's alpha = .88).
The Turnover intention was assessed with a single item (i.e., "If I had the opportunity, I would certainly quit my current job") adapted from the international literature (Waung & Brice, 2007), on a six-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). (Argyle, Martin, & Crossland, 1989), consisting of 29 items on a four-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (the statement does not represent me at all) to 4 (the statement totally represents me; e.g., "I'm not particularly optimistic about the future";
Personal Stress was assessed through the Italian version of the Perceived Stress Scale (Cohen, Kamarck, & Mermelstein, 1983;Fossati, 2010), consisting of 10 items on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (Never) to 4 (Very often; e.g., "How often, in the last month, have you had the feeling of not being able to keep up with all the things you had to do?"; Cronbach's alpha = .86).

| Data analysis
To test the relationship between demographical variables (i.e., age, gender, and work status) and each measured variable, independent sample t-tests, multiple regression, and generalized linear model for categorical and ordinal data were carried out with SPSS 22.0 statistical program.
To test the associations between the main variables, we performed a correlation analysis. Mediation analyses were performed through the regression approach and the bootstrap estimation through the adoption of PROCESS, the SPSS macro developed by Hayes and Preacher (2014).

| Results
Gender, age, education, and work seniority were included as control variables. Table 2 presents the descriptive statistics and zero-order correlations among the measured variables; all Asymmetry and Kurtosis values of the measured variables were between À1 and +1 (the only slight exception was the Kurtosis relative to the turnover intention which was equal to À1.1).
Except for significant gender differences for turnover intention (t 303 = 3.1, p = .002), job satisfaction (t 303 = À2.7, p = .007), and happiness levels (t 303 = À2.41, p = .016), in the direction of better outcomes for men, no other control variables (length of service, education, and age) provided significant differences between groups.

| Correlation analysis
Associations among the main variables are reported in Table 2. In line with previous literature indications, organizational identification was positively related to job satisfaction; in a similar vein, organizational identification was negatively related to turnover intention. Correlations further confirmed that job satisfaction was positively related to happiness and negatively related to personal stress, while the reverse emerged with regards to turnover intention, which was positively related to personal stress and negatively related to happiness.

| Mediation analyses
To test whether the beneficial effect of organizational identification goes above and beyond organizational well-being to invest in personal well-being in terms of happiness (improving it) and personal stress (reducing it), we ran two mediation analyses by relying on PROCESS, the SPSS macro developed by Hayes and Preacher (2014). In particular, we considered organizational identification as the independent variable, job satisfaction and turnover intention as parallel mediators, and happiness and personal stress as dependent variables respectively (PROCESS model number 4). The two supposed mediators are moderately correlated (r = À.48, p = .003).

Happiness as the outcome variable
The mediation model in which happiness is the outcome variable is depicted in Figure 2. Regression coefficients are described in Table 3. As shown in the figure, organizational identification positively predicted job satisfaction and negatively predicted turnover intention. More importantly for the present purpose, the direct effect of organizational identification on happiness was significantly mediated by job satisfaction and turnover intention. In line with our prediction, the bootstrap analysis with 5,000 resampling confirmed that both the indirect effect via the job satisfaction (b = .04; 95% CI: LLCI = .0182; ULCI = .0681) and via the turnover intention (b = .03; 95% CI: LLCI = .0090; ULCI = .0489) were significant, while the direct effect disappeared when considering the mediators ( Figure 2).

Personal stress as the outcome variable
The mediation model in which personal stress is the outcome variable is depicted in Figure 3. Regression coefficients are described in Table 3. As shown in the figure, organizational identification positively predicted job satisfaction and negatively predicted turnover intention. More specifically, the direct effect of organizational identification on personal stress was mediated by job satisfaction and turnover intention. In line with our prediction, the bootstrap analysis with 5,000 resamplings confirmed that both the indirect effect via the job satisfaction (b = À.06; 95% CI: LLCI = À.1053; ULCI = À.0222) and via the turnover intention (b = À.04; 95% CI: LLCI = À.0701; ULCI = À.0124) were significant, while the direct effect disappeared when considering the mediators.
Thus, overall, the mediation analyses confirmed our idea, showing that organizational identification predicts personal well-being through enhanced organizational well-being.
F I G U R E 2 Mediation model in which the effect of organizational identification on happiness is mediated by two parallel mediators: Job satisfaction and turnover intention. ***p < .001.
T A B L E 3 Regression coefficients for the mediation model with happiness as an outcome

| GENERAL DISCUSSION
An abundance of literature highlights that OI promotes employees' well-being on a series of organizational outcomes (Hameed et al., 2021). In the present paper, we explored whether employees' well-being may further contribute to their personal sense of happiness (vs. personal stress). To this end, we surveyed employees on measures of OI, organizational well-being, happiness, and personal stress. In line with the literature, OI was related to employees' well-being, in the form of enhanced job satisfaction and, by contrast, reduced turnover intention (Jenkins & Delbridge, 2014;Lyu, Yao, Zhang, & Liu, 2020). Moreover, confirming the spill-over hypothesis (Knight & Haslam, 2010;Lee et al., 2021), organizational well-being emerged as further related to personal well-being, in the form of enhanced happiness and reduced personal stress. This allowed us to connect two strands of research, that is, the one examining the positive effects of OI on workers' outcomes and the one showing that job satisfaction further contributes to individual global well-being.
From a theoretical point of view, the present paper suggests novel insights into the role of OI in people's lives. The great bulk of research on the topic has been focused on examining organizational outcomes as the main results of OI: still, individuals spend much time of their own life within the organizational context, so it is plausible, as we showed, that their organizational well-being further impacts upon their general sense of happiness (and, by contrast, their stress interventions Chancellor, Layous, & Lyubomirsky, 2015;Fisher, 2010;Ramaci et al., 2020;Salanova, Llorens, Acosta, & Torrente, 2013).
Many empirical and theoretical contributions are unanimous in considering that personal outcomes have a feedback effect on work performance itself, productivity, and the quality of internal relationships, and this can help us better understand the practical relevance, both from the point of view of saving economic and organizational resources (internal organization, working climate, the absence from work, etc.) and from the workers' health and happiness state (Robertson & Cooper, 2011).
Among the interventions, evidence in the literature seems to indicate that those that focus primarily on membership, affiliation, and participation seem to be particularly effective on workers' happiness and well-being (Meyers & van Woerkom, 2016;Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005) highlighting once again the importance of OI processes in the well-being of workers .
It is necessary to consider that the study presented here has some limitations, in particular with regard to the cross-sectional nature of the data and the small sample. This suggests we should be cautious in relation to a causal interpretation of findings: nevertheless, we are reassured by the fact that previous research consistently showed the effect of organizational identification on employees' reactions, therefore it is reasonable to speculate that this impacts subsequently on personal well-being, to a greater degree than the reverse direction. Future studies, nevertheless, should be carried out to further confirm this causal direction, through longitudinal design or larger samples.
Despite this limitation, overall, this research represents an empirical verification of the importance of OI for happiness and Human Resource Management: organizations should pay a high level of attention to the analysis and consideration of the wide set of variables (organizational and relational) that make a workplace a great place to work, so as to overcome the simple search for certification, and refer more often, in everyday practice, to the motto "Happiness is the new productivity" (Oswald et al., 2015). The authors declare that there are no potential conflicts of interest concerning the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Open Access Funding provided by Universita degli Studi di Bergamo within the CRUI-CARE Agreement.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.