Who I’m Going to Become Is Not Clear! COVID-19’s Impact on Future Professional Identity Clarity

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a natural, strong, and external identity-threatening event, on workers’ future professional identity clarity trajectories. We examine the influence of workers’ current professional identity beliefs (self-efficacy, imposterism) on their pre-COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 future professional identity clarity trajectories. Using a repeated measures design, we test our model with 223 observations collected from a unique sample of early career STEM academics participating in a nine-month collaboration with start-ups. As expected, we find that the COVID-19 pandemic hindered future professional identity clarity growth. Further, we find that both self-efficacy and imposterism encourage future professional identity clarity growth, and that self-efficacy provides a protective benefit for workers’ future professional identity clarity trajectories in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study has implications for research on identity, self-efficacy, and imposterism. We provide practical implications of this research.