Multiple identities in franchising

The extant literature on organizational identification has explored the existence and interactions between different levels of identification that individuals may hold within the same organization. Such research has tended to focus on nested groups within the organization, and employee settings rather than contexts where there are multiple organization claims. In this paper we explore identification in a specific organizational setting, that of franchising and its network of quasi-independent entrepreneurs. More specifically we focus on multi-brand franchisees, that is franchisees who belong to more than one franchise system, and thus have more than one ‘master’. We propose that franchisees may experience multiple levels of identification that are unique to franchising, and examine the antecedents and organizational outcomes for two forms of identification - franchisor and franchisee network identification. Both forms of identification are found to be positively related to the organizational affective commitment of franchisees, which in turn, shows a positive effect on franchisees’ performance and a negative effect on their intentions to leave the system. We respond to calls to empirically explore the interactive effects of multiple identification, and find that divergences in franchisee network and franchisor identification negatively impact affective commitment.