Worker‐organization goal misalignment and support for collective action

Abstract As workplace inequality persists, understanding the psychological processes motivating collective action engagement becomes imperative. In one domain of collective action, labor unionization, membership in the United States has continuously declined since the 1980s. Despite this decline, recent surveys suggest that pro‐union sentiment is rising. Amid workplace inequity and rising public interest in unionization, we draw from research on collective action and organizational identification to examine whether exposure to worker‐organization conflict and information about unions changes how workers evaluate existing and novel organizational grievance procedures, and consequently, increases pro‐union sentiment. Across four studies ( N = 3,143), we find that exposure to workplace conflicts and information about unions reduces workers’ perceived alignment with organizational grievance procedures and increases pro‐union attitudes, relative to control conditions where participants are not exposed to information about unions. These findings have implications for employee wellbeing and for the psychological processes implicated in collective action organizing.