Workplace Identity Research Articles

Book review: Trijita Gonsalves, Women in the Civil Services: Gender and Workplace Identities in India

Trijita Gonsalves, Women in the Civil Services: Gender and Workplace Identities in India (Routledge, 2022), 170 pp. ₹1,295; £38.99.ISBN: 978-1-032-02417-2 (HBK); ISBN: 978-1-032-04528-3 (PBK); ISBN: 978-1-003-19363-0 (EBK).

Negotiating Trans Identity and Boundaries at Work: How Situational and Personal Factors Affect Workplace Identity Communication

Negotiating Trans Identity and Boundaries at Work: How Situational and Personal Factors Affect Workplace Identity Communication

The green ceiling for NRM careers in public service

Actors involved in environmental decision-making bring personal values that extend into the professional sphere, to varied effect. NRM professionals are encouraged to set aside personal values in the workplace. Using semi-structured interviews, this research investigated how ecocentric values are contested in public service NRM in local government in South-East Queensland, Australia. Eight participants described challenges advocating from their disciplinary expertise, communication tactics they found necessary to find purchase within their organisations, and how they felt disciplinary contestations and their workplace identity affected their career. From personal accounts, we theorise and describe a ‘green ceiling’, acting as both a social barrier and structural force limiting the expression of ecocentric values and constrains the influence of those perceived to be ecocentric in public service NRM. The green ceiling presents a framework for understanding how NRM professionals who espouse ecocentric qualities, experience slowed career progress, low job security, career interruption and workplace grief.

How workplace identities and team management practices affect distributed team auditors' willingness to speak up

AbstractDistributed, rather than co‐located, teams increasingly perform audit work, raising regulator concerns that distributed team communication issues may affect audit quality. We investigate upward communication (i.e., raising issues to supervisors), a key communication dimension related to audit quality. In Study 1, we survey 69 senior auditors to establish that distributed team upward communication suffers. Furthermore, distributed team auditors identify less with their teams and struggle to know when and how to speak up. Because both are linked to inhibited upward communication, we next experimentally test firm practices with the potential to attenuate these problems. Study 2, an experiment with 128 staff auditors and interns, reveals that making auditors' professional identities salient improves upward communication on co‐located teams with strong team identities but not on distributed teams with weak team identities. Study 3, an experiment with 58 staff auditors, replicates a key Study 2 finding with a design that makes no reference to team identity strength. Specifically, in the presence of a salient professional identity, upward communication is significantly higher for co‐located relative to distributed team auditors. Study 4, an experiment with 69 staff auditors, focuses solely on distributed teams. It indicates that several distributed team management practices, including one‐on‐one and standing daily meetings, encourage upward communication. Finally, Study 5, informal interviews with eight audit seniors, corroborates key survey and experimental findings. Combined, our results provide insights into why distributed team communication suffers, refine audit voice theory, and provide regulators, practitioners, and researchers with multiple paths to improve audit quality.

Authenticity and atypicality in leadership: Can an atypical leader afford to be authentic?

AbstractLeaders from typically privileged backgrounds, such as White, male, elite‐educated and upper‐class individuals, often find it easier to craft an authentic identity in professional settings than their atypical counterparts. These atypical leaders, which include women, LGBT+, ethnic minorities or those from less affluent socio‐economic backgrounds, can indeed construct an authentic workplace identity. However, this often demands significant emotional investment and the navigation of challenges, such as reconciling conflicting identities, especially in institutions tailored predominantly for the typical leaders. While authenticity and diversity are highly desired qualities in leadership, we argue that authenticity remains a privilege primarily enjoyed by leaders from typical backgrounds. By drawing on Hochschild's notion of emotional labour and Castoriadis's concepts of autonomy and heteronomy, we shed light on the dynamic interplay between authenticity and atypicality. Further, we present a conceptual framework that outlines how atypical leaders can manifest authenticity in their roles, and the ensuing implications for driving organisational change rooted in diversity.

Workforce agility, organizational identity and solidarity as antecedents of innovative work behaviour – an examination using structural equation modelling

PurposeThe purpose of the study was to identify the inter-relationship of certain antecedents of innovative work behaviour (IWB). The antecedents identified for the study were workplace agility (WA), organizational identity (OI) and organizational solidarity (OS).Design/methodology/approachData for the study were collected online using four standardized and validated questionnaires from 364 gainfully employed respondents from across Saudi Arabia. The respondents belonged to various forms of organizations like manufacturing, service, hospital and banking. The data collected for the study were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM).FindingsThe study found a significant positive relationship between the identified concepts of WA, workplace identity, OS and IWB.Originality/valueA detailed review of the literature found that no previous studies had examined the complex relationship between the identified constructs. The results of the study found a significant positive relationship between the constructs. The findings of the study have many theoretical and practical values and implications. It also enriches the literature about the antecedents of IWB. It is expected that the present study will act as a trigger for more empirical examinations in this interesting area.

Unmasking nonfamily employees’ complex contribution to family business performance: A place identity theory approach

The study purpose is to understand the nature and functioning of workplace identity verification of nonfamily employees in family firms as it affects financial and innovation performance of the family firm under the umbrella of Place Identity Theory. Creating a productive employee workplace environment involves verifying elements of a workplace identity meaning set composed of firm identification, firm loyalty, and decision making participation. QCA provides combinations of those workplace identity elements that create the greatest potential for financial and innovation performance. Interactional combinations of firm identification, firm loyalty, and decision making participation of family firm nonfamily employees creating the greatest potential for financial and innovation performance vary by firm age and CEO duality. Complementarity between SEM and QCA demonstrates the benefits of using a mainstream quantitative analysis method with the benefits of an emerging qualitative analysis method, thus, expanding Place Identity Theory's descriptive, predictive, and explanatory power.

“It's how people act out there that counts”: Examining linkages between emerging and protective organisationally desirable managerial masculinities and a reimagining of formal safety policies in the offshore oilfield

The male-dominated occupations comprising North Sea offshore oilfield work have long been stereotyped as attracting rough, ‘hard’ and pro-risk identities. However, stereotyping of male identities in high-risk workspaces are challenged by recent literatures citing complex, hybrid and emerging notions of safety-positive masculinities. Industrial policies are often highlighted as the catalyst for rapidly reshaping men's masculinities towards identities interlinked with performances of safety. Despite claims, few studies conduct structured policy analysis of safety-risk policies and pair this with interviews with policy makers. This study contributes to a body of existing literatures examining how formal oilfield safety policy influences construction of oilmen's institutional masculinities. Structured Document Analysis (DA) of three core safety policies was conducted at a major Scottish oilfield drilling organisation. Semi-structured interviews with seven policy-maker-supervisors were also conducted onshore; exploring contents, construction, and formal-informal goals of policy. DA uncovered two distinct blueprints influencing workplace identity; a dominant blueprint promoting ‘traditional’ oilfield masculinities, and a secondary blueprint promoting emerging oilfield masculinities. Policy makers revealed complex, informal processes of managerial reimagining, reframing, and selective policy interpretations, leading to prioritisation and promotion of motifs from only the secondary policy blueprint in the worksite; upholding emerging protective and pro-safety workplace masculinities. This downplayed, minimised, and overrode the ‘traditional’ -more prevalent- dominant policy motifs. The importance of findings are discussed, as is a pathway for future organisational masculinities, policy and energy-safety research to take advantage of the methodological approach and learnings developed from this scholarship.

Academic Identity, Scholarly identity, and the Hero’s Journey

The notion of academic identity often refers to several different but related phenomena (Flowerdew & Wang, 2015; Gee, 2000), the first among which are the characteristics of being employed as a professor at a university and all the challenges that come with it as a professional workplace. For example, Smith et al. (2022) note that “academic identity has been a topic of interest for many years, often dealing with the complexity of the academic role within organisations where significant ‘professionalism’ (migration to key performance indicators and managerialism) has taken place following a period of significant expansion in student numbers and a move towards neoliberalism” (p. 1294). In this case the term academic identity is perhaps akin to the notion of professional identity as it shares much in common with other workplace identities and the relationships and power struggles that come with it (Billot, 2010; Clegg, 2008; see also Drennan et al., 2017; Henkel, 2005). Yang et al. (2022) discuss the role of emotional resilience in navigating this process.

The firm that would not die: Post-death organizing, alumni events, and organization ghosts

We show that alumni events, as settings where workplace identities and relationships reappear and are restaged, are not simply instruments to build and sustain commercially valuable networks. In some cases, they are also forms of post-death organizing for the purpose of celebrating and remembering defunct organizations. Based on participant observation of three annual lunches for alumni of the former accountancy firm Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and interviews with participants, organizers and non-participants, we show that, while alumni reveal an identification with the firm by the act of attending, their first-order motives are primarily social i.e. to meet old colleagues. The “dead” firm as an organization is an indistinct object for them. Yet notwithstanding the weak nature of their firm-based identity, in aggregate the seating arrangements at these lunches re-stage formal features of the dead organization simply from individual alumnus choices to sit with former colleagues. Far from being a trivial emergent outcome, our hand-collected seating plan data is suggestive of how organizations can have a “ghostly” afterlife via alumni events. This analysis establishes intersections between studies of professional service firm alumni events, post-death organizing and ghostliness and points to a broader agenda of enquiry into the afterlife of defunct organizations.

Factors Explaining Workplace Learning of Turkish Research Assistants

The purpose of this study was to explore the structural relationships among diverse variables to provide a comprehensive understanding of Turkish research assistants’ workplace learning. The cross-sectional data of the study were collected online from 21 universities around Turkey. A total of 1218 research assistants from various disciplines took part in the study. The findings revealed that workplace affordances as well as the personal factors of workplace effort and personal agency had direct, positive, and statistically significant effects on the workplace learning of research assistants. The rest of the personal factors including vocational identity, workplace identity, and interpersonal agency had statistically significant direct effects on workplace affordances. Moreover, these three personal factors had statistically significant indirect effects on workplace learning. These findings showed that research assistants’ workplace learning was impacted by both what the workplaces offered and how the research assistants perceived these affordances. The findings also showed that some of the personal variables affected workplace learning independent of workplace affordances.

How Workplace Identities and Team Management Practices Affect Distributed Team Auditors’ Willingness to Speak Up

How Workplace Identities and Team Management Practices Affect Distributed Team Auditors’ Willingness to Speak Up

Trading Spaces: Space as Metaphor for Contingency in Writing Centers

This article offers a critical reading of writing center workplace space. Weaving together counterstorying with semiotic, geographic, and rhetorical analysis of space, the author provides an alternative way of understanding the connections between our physical and metaphorical workspaces. Precarity and contingency, the article posits, are made more palpable through connection to physical space because writing center labor (and workers) are often identified mostly through their space and availability. Ultimately, this article argues for a new way forward that decouples writing center workers and labor from inhabited workplace space. Arguing that these spaces are gendered, classes, and raced (among other things), we need to reimagine our workplace identities as separate from the spaces in which labor takes place.

Workplace Identity Profiles: Associations with Personality Traits and Work Adaptation of Young Japanese Adults

Workplace Identity Profiles: Associations with Personality Traits and Work Adaptation of Young Japanese Adults

Influence of All Sexual Orientations and Gender Identity Upon Work Authenticity through Satisfaction with Supervisor

The ability for workers to be authentic in the workplace benefits individuals and organizations alike. However, empirical studies examining the influences of employees’ satisfaction with a supervisor and authenticity are limited, especially for employees with identities such as LGBTQIA. Therefore, this exploratory study aimed to investigate state-based versus trait-based perceived work authenticity, satisfaction with a supervisor, and the influence of sexual orientation and gender identity within one Fortune 50 company in the United States. In addition, differences in perceived authenticity and satisfaction with a supervisor were assessed by dividing participants into two groups—one as LGBTQIA and the second as cisgender and heterosexual. Quantitative data was collected with a cross-sectional online survey assessing work authenticity, satisfaction with one’s supervisor, and demographic questions. The analysis and empirical tests included descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, independent t-tests, and general linear models. Findings from this research study indicated that authenticity correlates to satisfaction with one’s supervisor, and workers who identify as LGBTQIA report lower levels of authenticity, especially in self-alienation. Recommendations are provided regarding future research and improved organizational and human resource management practices for an authentic workforce or diversity and inclusion. Keywords: authenticity, work authenticity, well-being, Independent Authenticity Measure at Work, self-determination theory, Satisfaction with My Supervisor Scale, human resource practices, sexual orientation, gender identity, LGBTQIA, silent identity, workplace identity, diversity, inclusion

Braided identities in acute care nurses' practices of work: professional, clinician, employee

PurposeThis paper aims to explore how dispositions of nursing habitus carry shift handover into practice in acute care.Design/methodology/approachHandover (the exchange of information by nurses between shifts) is more recently purported to be a procedure that transfers the responsibility of and accountability for care to maintain patient safety. Using Bourdieu's theory of practice as lens, this paper examines data from an ethnographic study of nurses' work in acute care to reveal what happens in and around nurses' practices of handover.FindingsExploring handover as a practice enables identification of nurses' responsibilities of work as professional, clinician and employee. These responsibilities are not practised separately, rather, as braided identities they are embodied into nurses' practices of work. Nurses' clinician and employee identities address the clinical and organisationally relevant material contained in handover, but it is in the ways that nurses embody their responses that their professional identity becomes evident.Research limitations/implicationsViewing handover as a procedure suggests that nurses are rule followers and/or sole players and conceptualises nurses as individualised professionals only. This received knowledge as doxa misrecognises the centrality of connectedness between nurses in their work in the acute care setting.Originality/valueRecognising nurses' braided workplace identities as being professional, clinician and employee upends the doxa of nurses work as tasks and roles in the delivery of healthcare in the acute care setting.

“You gotta have your cry”: Administrator and direct care worker experiences of death in assisted living

Assisted living (AL) is increasingly a site of end-of-life care and a long-term care location where growing numbers of people are aging in place and dying. Despite these trends, limited research focuses on how death and grief impact the work environment in AL. This grounded theory analysis examined qualitative data collected from 27 administrators and 38 direct care workers (DCWs) in 7 diverse settings. As assisted living administrators and DCWs experienced resident death, they engaged in a dynamic and individualized process of “managing the normalization of death,” which refers to the balance of self-identity and workplace identity. The process of reconciling these opposing contexts in AL involved several individual- and community-level conditions. Administrators and DCWs would benefit from additional resources and training around death. Increasing collaboration with hospice and clarifying policies about death communication would better prepare the workforce to acknowledge the end of life in assisted living.

“Identity-Work” and Workers’ Interests Articulation in an Oil Refinery, Nigeria: A Post-Structuralist Evaluation

Beyond mainstream “essentialist” discourse and analysis of management and leadership practices in work organizations, labor process theory has continued to interrogate normative assumptions behind management roles and practices, in shaping the “lived-work” experiences and “agentic” responses of workers, in contemporary workplace. Critical analysis of management roles in the context of contemporary workplace has been able to make insightful and critical connections between work processes, workers own–sense making, and articulation of their interests in the workplace. Using post-structuralist analysis in the evaluations of the concepts of “identity-work”, and “interest articulation”, the paper offers a somewhat different understanding of management and leadership discourses and their normative assumptions, in an Oil Refinery, Nigeria. Workers construct and enact their workplace identity, thereby giving a re-interpretation and re-appropriation of management discourse in the organization. While utilizing the analytical remits of labour process theory and critical perspectives, the paper re-conceptualizes how workers in the oil refinery, enact “repertoire” of “selves” in securing their identities in the workplace. In their “knowledgeability” and “agentic orientation”, workers in the refinery “collude” with the “hubris” of management in the organization, in order to invert and subvert managerial practices, and its normative intentions. Through theoretical conceptualizations, the paper demonstrates the specific dimensions of these inversion and subversion. The paper therefore seeks to insert “workers-agency” back into the analysis of power-relations in the workplace; agency that is not overtly under the absolute grip of management’s control, but with multiplicity of identities and multilevel manifestations.

Workplace attachment and the eco-restructuring of people-workplace relationships in China's extractive forestry

The eco-transition of extractive industries poses significant challenges for workers, and there is growing concern about the negative impact caused by the transformation on extractive workers. Yet, the socio-psychological impact of the eco-transition remains poorly understood. Drawing from the theory of place attachment and a case study of a forestry-dependent community in China, this study examines how the logging ban policy shapes people-workplace relationships in the forestry sector among different groups—laid-off workers, remaining workers, and retirees. The findings show that the eco-restructuring of people-workplace relationships is central to the eco-transition of extractive industries and the process is complex and heterogenous. Laid-off workers and their kin experience the abrupt loss of workplace identity and dependency, which negatively affects their well-being. In contrast, the growing workplace attachment of the remaining workers can be observed as work units are maintained as the basic transition unit instead of being demolished, serving as stable sources of income for the workers and maintain functional dependency in the context of a lack of job opportunities in other economic sectors. The retirees experience few psychological impacts from the eco-transition as they continue to enjoy a stable pension and hold firm their workplace attachment derived from long-term living and working in the forestry industry. Nevertheless, population loss and out-migration pose challenges to the place attachment of workers and retirees. The findings offer new insight of how the eco-transition of extractive industries affects workers and draws attention to the non-material aspects of just transitions.

Identity work of management accountants in a merger: The construction of identity in liminal space

In response to calls for research on the ways in which management accountants make sense of their professional identities in organisational disruptions, this paper explores their identity work during a merger. Drawing on a case study of a merger between two Dutch banks, the paper examines their identity work as they found themselves in a liminal state – i.e. “betwixt and between” workplace identities. The paper identifies two types of identity work in a merger. Inside-out identity work was the process of identity negotiation through which each partnering group sought to make sense of their own distinctive liminal experiences. This type of identity work brought about intra- and inter-professional conflict. By contrast, outside-in identity work was founded on intergroup bases of identification, which were authenticated by credible role-models. This type of identity work gave rise to the construction of a superordinate workplace identity through which incoherent workplace identities could co-exist with shared intergroup identities. The paper contributes to the literature by highlighting the persistence of incoherent identity positions of management accountants in a merger and the intergroup struggles this generates. Moreover, it illuminates the processes through which these positions can ultimately be brought closer together.