Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (Reich, 1993) proposed that the pronouns employees use to describe their organization reveal information about their levels of engagement and affective commitment at work. In particular, he predicted that employees who describe their organization using the pronoun “we” are more engaged and committed than those who use the pronoun “they” in describing their organization. Reich's proposal has intuitive appeal and has been repeated in popular press accounts, but the accuracy of his prediction has not been empirically evaluated. In this article, we systematically examine the “Reich test” and find that the gender of the respondent is an important boundary condition to Reich's prediction. That is, our findings suggest that use of the pronoun “we” may serve as a predictor of work engagement and affective commitment for men, but not for women. We discuss the implications of these findings and the promise of exploring employees' linguistic indicators to understand social, affective, and cognitive psychological processes.

中文翻译：

---

代词作为预测工作态度的语言线索的评估

前劳工部长罗伯特·赖希 (Reich, 1993) 提出，员工用来描述其组织的代词揭示了有关他们在工作中的敬业度和情感承诺水平的信息。特别是，他预测使用代词“我们”描述组织的员工比使用代词“他们”描述组织的员工更敬业和忠诚。Reich 的提议具有直观的吸引力，并已在大众媒体报道中重复出现，但他的预测的准确性尚未经过实证评估。在本文中，我们系统地考察了“Reich test”，发现受访者的性别是 Reich 预测的重要边界条件。那是，我们的研究结果表明，使用代词“我们”可以预测男性的工作投入和情感承诺，但对女性则不然。我们讨论了这些发现的含义以及探索员工语言指标以了解社会、情感和认知心理过程的前景。