Search results

The purpose of this paper is to build and enrich theory around professional identity construction by investigating the development of professional identity under conditions of marginalized gender identity. Professional identity is defined by Ibarra and by Schein as one ' s professional self-concept based on attributes, beliefs, values, motives, and experiences. Professional identity construction under conditions of marginalization presents an interesting puzzle. Professional roles are defined as prestigious and provide the role holder with autonomy and, often, a degree of privilege. However, minority professionals are often accorded little prestige and/or privilege because their identities are perceived as inferior.

The research studies narratives by 33 prominent women engineers with careers in management who discuss what it means to be both women and engineers holding high management positions in their organizations.

The research demonstrates that the process of identity construction for women engineers differs in significant ways from that of their male counterparts. The process is centered in redefinition that allows women professionals to construct possible selves and establish positive professional identities: redefinition of occupational rhetorics, disadvantage, and the self.

This study of professional identity construction under conditions of disadvantaged gender identity contributes a new perspective for theorists researching professional identity construction. The results reveal that the development of professional identity for minority women may involve the processes and tasks of redefinition. The tasks in redefinition include redefining disadvantage, redefining the profession, and redefining the self. Moreover, the use of narrative calls for organizational researchers to consider theories in sociology, history, policy, and psychology in the attempts to answer careers questions.

The implications of this research are significant for human resource management practices in the construction and engineering field.

While there is growing interest in professional identity construction (e.g. Clarke et al.), little is known about how marginalization may influence the development of professional identity of minority professionals, such as women managers in engineering.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how refugees from a professional career domain restore a coherent narrative when confronting barriers to recognition of their former career status. It focuses in particular on the identity work in which they engage in order to reconcile tensions between their current status as refugees and their professional identity.

In total, 15 refugees to the UK who were professionally qualified in medicine or teaching in their country of origin took part in interviews or focus groups exploring career barriers, plans and future aspirations. Initial inductive thematic analysis identified recognition of professional identities as a primary concern. Further analytic iterations between theory and empirical material sharpened the focus on identifying the tensions in their professional identity work.

Participants struggled both to restore their former professional identity and to develop alternative identities. Professional identity work limited, but also sustained them in the face of barriers they encountered as refugees.

More support for refugee career development would facilitate adaptation to local job markets, thereby addressing gaps in education and health services in the UK.

The paper highlights the tensions in refugee professional identity work and particularly the challenges and rewards of professional identification in the face of employment barriers.

This study seeks to examine the identity‐relevant stress proposition according to which events occurring in highly‐salient identity domains have a greater impact on psychological well‐being than events occurring in less salient identity domains. The aim of the study is to integrate identity theory into occupational stress research by investigating the proposition that the lack of verification of a salient role identity will be associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion.

Using a questionnaire methodology, data were obtained from full‐time, permanent, human resource professionals from multiple organizations.

As predicted, the lack of verification that occurs when an employer denies a professional the opportunity to engage in the responsibilities associated with a salient role was associated with more emotional exhaustion. Moreover, in a way consistent with identity theory, both role prestige and affective commitment to the profession moderated this relationship, providing additional support for the identity‐relevant stress proposition.

Identity theory offers a valuable perspective for work stress research, one that appears to be especially applicable to highly professionalized occupations.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an emerging approach in research on school leadership, within the framework of the “International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP)”, where one of the three key research strands is “Principals’ identities”.

The paper responds, from a biographical-narrative approach, to knowledge about the impact of the Spanish model of school management on the professional identity of school principals. It analyses the biographical interviews of 15 school principals, through a process of structuring and categorizing the data collected, applying content analysis.

The dimensions of the principals’ identities emerge in different categories: personal identity, professional identity (internal perspective), professional identity (external perspective), social identity, professionalization and dual identity.

The authors studied identities in a project entitled “Successful school principals”, understanding that successful leadership practices largely depend on headteachers’ identities. That is, when the identities are weak and unstable, with a poor identification with the managerial tasks and functions, and not recognised by the teaching staff, the school will probably be unsuccessful. On the contrary, when there are headteachers with a strong professional identity, the authors want to show that there is a positive impact on improvement of results. In the future, in the development of the research project, the authors aim to verify the relationship between headteachers’ identities and educational improvement.

The knowledge gained in our study would enable us to reimagine lines in order to increase the professionalization and identities of headteachers, redesigning work contexts in ways which can strengthen fragile and unstable identities. Finally, the implications of the study in relation to future research can be summarised by the following ideas.

Understanding the world of the lives (lebenswelt) of Spanish headteachers means adopting a hermeneutic approach, observing the self-interpretation comments expressed by the subjects, where the temporal and biographical dimensions occupy a key role. The authors understand professional identity as a socially constructed and personally created experience with its own meanings, feelings and intentions. Therefore, it is logical to use, for data collection, individual interviews which explore the school context and the impact which it has on those subjects who are part of the professional environment. In addition, the authors have the intention of following up the study of identities.

It formulates, first, the theoretical framework for the professional identity from a narrative approach, linked – at the same time – to the practice of leadership, as an interactive relationship with the other members of the school. Successful leadership practices depend to a large degree on strong principals’ identities. Finally, the results are discussed, and future lines are proposed to articulate and strengthen the identity of school principals in Spain.

“Becoming” a doctor involves the acquisition of medical knowledge, skills and professional identity. Medical professional identity formation (MPIF) is complex, multi-factorial and closely linked to societal expectations, personal and social identity. Increasingly, doctors are required to engage in leadership/management involving significant identity shift. This paper aims to explore medical professional identity (MPI) and MPIF in relation to doctors as leaders. Selected identity theories are used to enrich the understanding of challenges facing doctors in leadership situations and two concepts are introduced: medical leader identity (MLI) and medical leader identity formation (MLIF) and consideration given to how they can be nurtured within medical practice.

A rapid conceptual review of relevant literature was carried out to identify a set of relevant concepts and theories that could be used to develop a new conceptual framework for MLI and MLIF.

MLIF is crucial for doctors to develop as medical leaders, and, like MPIF, the process begins before medical school with both identities influenced, shaped and challenged throughout doctors’ careers. Individuals require support in developing awareness that their identities are multiple, nested, interconnected and change over time.

This paper draws on concepts from wider literature on professional identity, in relation to how doctors might develop their MLI alongside their MPI. It offers a new perspective on MPI in the light of calls on doctors to “become and be healthcare leaders” and introduces the new concepts of MLI and MLIF.

This paper aims to examine whether increasing the salience of the internal auditor’s professional identity, defined by the expectations of their professional group, increases internal auditors’ judgments of the severity of internal control concerns when their organizational identity is high.

This paper tests the hypothesis using a laboratory experiment with internal auditors as participants.

The results support the hypothesis that professional identity salience moderates the relation between organizational identity and the assessed severity of identified internal control weaknesses. Increasing the salience of professional identity results in a more severe assessment of identified internal control weaknesses when organizational identity is high than when it is low.

Prior research in the lab and in the field provides mixed results about the impact of organizational identity on internal auditors’ judgments of the severity of identified internal control concerns. This paper contributes to the discussion on this issue. In addition, the results have implications for the debate about the benefits and costs of in-house versus out-sourced internal audit functions.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the discussion of the recursive relationship between the identity of a profession and the professional identity of individuals in the context of change.

The paper draws on qualitative data collected as part of a pilot study into change in the NHS. It draws on structuration theory and insights from social identity theory (SIT) to propose that the relationship between the collective level of the profession and the individual level of the professional is recursive.

The data suggest that individual professionals use and rewrite scripts of their profession but also draw upon new scripts as they engage with local change. To that extent they contribute from the local level upwards to the changing identity of their profession. Further more detailed micro level studies are required.

The argument is based on a limited data set and points towards the need for further microlevel studies which examine the recursive relationship between professionals' identity and the identity of a profession.

Further research can contribute to better understanding of local variance as professionals engage with change.

The paper fuses structuration theory and SIT and examines the agency/structure nexus in a specific change context.

This article is drawn from doctoral research exploring the identity struggles faced by professionals who take on management and leadership roles. The research focused on the experience of medical directors – the most senior doctor‐manager with board responsibility for medical affairs. Based on the fact that a medical director is a hybrid manager this research has implications for any professional who takes on a managerial or leadership role while continuing to practice their profession. Some challenges of working as a hybrid are associated with the difference in orientations between professionals and managers. While the notion of who and what a professional is has changed and new forms of accommodation have been forged the hybrid identity remains a site of potential conflict for the individual and those they work with. The purpose of this paper is to explore the experience of the hybrid identity.

The experience of the hybrid identity is explored through social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner).

The analysis reveals that the medical director role is ambiguous, that medical identity is robust and that medical management is difficult compared to clinical work. Managerial identity in general is constructed negatively and from the perspective of doctors. The importance of maintaining clinical credibility is both embraced as a resource which bolsters and maintains medical identity and so distinguishes medical directors from the taint associated with the pejorative managerial identity that doctors construct of managers.

The implications for the selection, training and development of doctors and medical directors are raised as are those for the relationship between doctors and patients, and doctors and the organisation. Some implications identified, specifically for leadership in practice are as follows: leadership/management is challenging and difficult compared to professional work; language use is significant for how leaders are perceived; language use has implications for leader effectiveness; early exposure to leadership for professionals is important; and leadership role definition is important for consistency and role credibility.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the process in which the software engineering students construct their professional identities.

The study followed the qualitative method using grounded theory methodology to examine the process of identity construction. Data were collected from final year software engineering students in an iterative manner.

Based on the present study, the study argues that entry-level identities of students are modified and adjusted in response to their experience of identity violations over the course of their academic program. These violations were caused by their unmet expectations from the academic program. The magnitude of these violations is influenced by their perceived value derived from the training they were receiving.

This paper explains the process of “identity morphing” as a mechanism by which students resolve the conflict/violation of their identities. The emergence and adaptation of different types of identities were examined. This study can be extended to the employees of IT organizations to draw a holistic picture.

The understanding of identity morphing process might enable organizations to enrich their interaction with their employees and thus provide avenues to improve their work-related outcomes.

Previous studies have explored professional identity construction among individuals. However, how software professionals construct their professional identity, during their education years, is relatively unexplored. The present study asserts that professional identities are formed among the students even before they join the organization.

Professional Identity Formation is the dynamic evolution to “think, act and feel” to become part of a professional community. This document presents the development and the study that aimed to assess the usability of a m-Learning Identity App (MLIA) focused on the formation of professional identity among undergraduate medical students.

MLIA development included four phases: Conceptual, prototype, pilot and implementation, before further deployment. The conceptual model was designed by eight faculty members from three Latin American universities. The prototype was developed and tested with stakeholders. The pilot was performed during 5 weeks before the implementation. Cross-sectional data collected during implementation from 138 medical students who completed a survey to assess the usability of MLIA are presented. During deployment, 977 posts were made on Professional Identity Formation, and examples of these posts are presented.

The prototype and pilot phases demanded improvements. The survey explored (1) Familiarity, (2) Perceived ease of use, (3) Perceived usefulness for Professional Identity Formation, (4) Satisfaction, (5) Intention to reuse (6) Digital aesthetics and (7) Safety. Results from the usability assessment suggest that students perceived MLIA as a secure space with positive aesthetics and ease of use.

Important limitations of the present study include, firstly, that it does not provide information on the effectiveness of the MLIA in shaping professional identity in medical students, it focuses exclusively on its development (conceptual model, prototype, pilot and implementation) and usability. Secondly, the study design did not consider a control group and, therefore, does not provide information on how the App compares with other strategies addressing self-reflection and sharing of meaningful experiences related to professional identity.

MLIA introduces a different approach to education, simulating a secure, easy-to-use, social media with a friendly interface in a safe environment to share academic and motivational moments, transitioning from being to becoming a professional.