The present research aims to examine the role played by perceived similarities between the workgroup and the organization in the relationships between workgroup identification, organizational identification, and affective organizational commitment. Using two different samples, we found that when perceived similarities were high, workgroup identification was more strongly related to organizational identification and that this relationship carried over to affective organizational commitment. These results were obtained with both a global measure of perceived similarities (Study 1) and a more narrow measure operationalizing perceived similarities in terms of value congruence (Study 2), confirming the generalizability of our results.
