Organizations endeavor to pursue the goal of organizational perfor¬mance under the competitive environment. For schools, a decline in fertility rates becomes a challenge, because this problem incurs the decrease of classes and the redundancy of teachers. Even the problem may lead to abolishing schools. However, the school’s performance may mitigate the effect of this problem. In addition, individuals can define themselves by the role of organizational members and thus devote themselves to achieve the organizational goals when they have high levels of organizational identification. In such cases, organizations can obtain the competitive advantage. Previous studies mostly focused on the beneficial effects of leisure activity on individual-level outcomes rather than organization-level outcomes. This study attempts to explore the influence of informal organizational leisure activity on the organizational identification, and the medicating effect of social capital. Another objective is to examine the whether the social capital can influence the organ-izational identification through the organizational trust and suspicion. The level of analysis is the individual level, and the scope is confined to the faculties of Junior High Schools in the middle area of Taiwan. We obtained 209 valid questionnaires in total.
The results show that leisure activity held by schools can lead to organizational identification through cognitive social capital, whereas leisure activity held by individual members has zero impact on organizational identification. While participation in leisure activity held by schools is positively related to relational and cognitive social capital, participation in leisure activity held by individual members is positively related to structural and relational social capital. In addition, cognitive social capital can increase the organizational identification through a low level of organizational suspicion. Social capital positively associates to organizational trust. However, only relational and cognitive social capitals help to reduce the levels of organizational suspicion. The results may provide guidelines to design leisure activities for schools.
