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A creative identity, the incorporation of creativity into self-definition, is associated with creative outcomes. Given the importance of creativity to organizational success, understanding creative identity and in particular creative identity work (the formation and maintenance of creative identity) can be useful in understanding creatives within organizations. To be considered creative, individuals need to not only produce unique artefacts, but these artefacts need to be assessed by legitimate judges as being creative. Judges may be within an organization (e.g., senior researchers within a laboratory) or may be external to an organization (e.g., award judges in international advertising competitions). Underpinning creative identity work is the creative assessment, however this assessment is ambiguous and contextual. In other words, what is considered creative in one context or by one judge may not be considered creative in another context or by different judges. The ambiguity of the creative assessment makes creative identity work a precarious undertaking. Based on two case studies – a R&D laboratory and an advertising agency – this research explores the strategies which creative individuals employ in their creative identity work in response to the ambiguity of the creative assessment. This research contributes to the growing area of creative identity research by unpacking three specific strategies used as part of identity work of creatives: defending, emotional distancing and differentiating. These strategies assist the creatives in maintaining a coherent sense of who they are within the organizational context despite the unpredictability of the creative assessment.

Work-life flexibility policies (e.g., flextime, telework, part-time, right-to-disconnect, and leaves) are increasingly important to employers as productivity and well-being strategies. However, policies have not lived up to their potential. In this chapter, the authors argue for increased research attention to implementation and work-life intersectionality considerations influencing effectiveness. Drawing on a typology that conceptualizes flexibility policies as offering employees control across five dimensions of the work role boundary (temporal, spatial, size, permeability, and continuity), the authors develop a model identifying the multilevel moderators and mechanisms of boundary control shaping relationships between using flexibility and work and home performance. Next, the authors review this model with an intersectional lens. The authors direct scholars’ attention to growing workforce diversity and increased variation in flexibility policy experiences, particularly for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality, which is defined as having multiple intersecting identities (e.g., gender, caregiving, and race), that are stigmatized, and link to having less access to and/or benefits from societal resources to support managing the work-life interface in a social context. Such an intersectional focus would address the important need to shift work-life and flexibility research from variable to person-centered approaches. The authors identify six research considerations on work-life intersectionality in order to illuminate how traditionally assumed work-life relationships need to be revisited to address growing variation in: access, needs, and preferences for work-life flexibility; work and nonwork experiences; and benefits from using flexibility policies. The authors hope that this chapter will spur a conversation on how the work-life interface and flexibility policy processes and outcomes may increasingly differ for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality compared to those with lower work-life intersectionality in the context of organizational and social systems that may perpetuate growing work-life and job inequality.

Managers play a crucial role in organizations. They make decisions that directly influence organizational success and significantly impact employees’ mental health, development and performance. They are responsible for ensuring the financial well-being and long-term sustainability of organizations. However, their mental health is often overlooked, which can negatively affect employees and organizations. This study aims to address managers’ mental health at work, by examining specifically the direct and indirect effects of identity verification on their psychological distress and depression through self-esteem at work. The study also aims to examine the moderating as well as moderated mediation effects of identity salience.

A sample of 314 Canadian managers working in 56 different companies was studied, using multilevel analyses.

The findings showed that the verification of managers’ identity vis-à-vis recognition is positively associated with psychological distress and depression. Self-esteem completely mediates the association between low identity verification vis-à-vis work control and psychological distress, and also the association between low identity verification vis-à-vis work control and superior support and depression, while it partially mediates the association between low identity verification vis-à-vis recognition and depression.

This study can also help both managers and human resource management practitioners in understanding the role of workplaces in the identity verification process and developing relevant interventions to prevent mental health issues among managers at work.

This study proposed a relatively unexplored approach to the study of managers’ mental health at work. Its integration of identity theory contributes to expanding research on management and workplace mental health issues.

As every day work is central to people's lives and events serve as significant contextual factors, examining what impact the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic restrictions had on knowledge workers warrants further investigation. The author's research question investigated how employees in the London Insurance Market had made sense of their work identities during a period of mandated remote work and isolation from co-workers, leaders and others, amidst a turbulent environment. To address this enquiry, this research drew on Goffman's institutional, dramaturgical and stigma theories.

Data used in this research are from an ongoing PhD study of how individuals conceive, construct and conduct their careers in this field. As individuals and their social worlds are interwoven, a qualitative methodological approach was employed in this research.

Participants were thrusted into a position where they had no prior knowledge what identity they should adopt in a situation which had totalising characteristics. The loss of clear boundaries between work and home setting caused a deterioration of participants' work identities whilst physical separation from their institutions and co-workers posed a risk of disconnecting their past work identities from the present. Moreover, participants' experiences of deterioration and disconnection were intertwined with their demographic and occupational identities.

This study aligns with existing research on identity work, emphasising the crucial role of social interaction in the formation of work identities. However, it also highlights that the establishment and sustenance of work identities is also reliant on individuals having separate frontstage and backstage settings to understand and interpret their conduct and those of their significant others.

This paper aims to explore the stages and processes of work identity reconstruction following a major health-related career shock.

In-depth case study and interpretive phenomenological methods are used to allow for deep reflective self-analysis of post-career shock stages. The paper explores the identity processes and stages a Chief of Human Resources of a multinational firm experienced after being deprived from his main working abilities as a result of a brain stroke.

Post-shock work identity stages and processes are identified, as long as the importance of identity threat, liminality, identity internalization and relational recognition in the reconstruction process. The findings propose new coping responses that may allow individuals to escape a diminished work identity: identity shedding and identity implanting.

While career shocks play a significant role in career development, there is currently little understanding of how career shocks may affect individuals' work identity or sense of self, particularly over time. The paper provides a nuanced understanding of this phenomenon, through process data collected at several points in time over a period of 14 years.

This research aims to present the results of a study that operationalizes the construct of perceived work identity deprivation (PWID) and examines its validity.

The authors adopted a mixed method design in this study where a Likert-type scale to measure PWID was developed based on the interviews of 40 workers and the questionnaires of 625 participants successively. Later, the generalizability of the scale was tested through quantitative data from 412 workers. Finally, validity analysis was conducted based on 380 usable questionnaires. Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS 24 and Mplus 7.0.

The findings of the study indicate that the reliability measures, exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analysis and subsequent convergent and discriminant validity tests support the PWID scale. The nomological validity of PWID is also presented, which demonstrates its predictive validity.

Despite highlighting the importance of work identity, prior research lacked to provide empirical foundations to understand this perception. This study fills this gap in the literature by providing a measure of PWID, distinguishing it from similar constructs and establishing convergent, discriminant and nomological validity. Moreover, by extending the range of theoretical and measurable deprivation of work identity, the authors hope to allow research to take into account a more complete picture of it. PWID scale can be used to develop more relevant suppression plans.

While there is vast research on expatriate adjustment, it is still known very little on how self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) in particular might cope with identity conflicts and how they engage with identity work. What is more, although there is some literature on the existence of expatriate bubbles, this does not cover how these bubbles might impact identity work. The purpose of this paper is to explore identity work that is taking place within expatriate bubbles and thus advance our knowledge on both expatriate bubbles and expatriate adjustment.

The study reports on the analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interview data collected from 37 self-initiated expatriate engineers from Greece, Spain and Italy, currently residing in Bristol, UK.

Previous studies have argued that expatriate bubbles impede adjustment. The study analysis, however, shows that expatriate bubbles can be not only a powerful mechanism for coping with foreignness and strengthening their sense of belonging but also act as identity workspaces where SIEs engaged with identity work and navigated identity conflicts.

The present study addresses two empirical gaps: the paucity of literature on the identity work that self-initiated expatriates engage with and the paucity studies on self-initiated expatriate engineers. The study also has a theoretical contribution as, drawing upon a Goffmanian dramaturgical framework sheds light on the back regions of performance taking place within expatriate bubbles. Thus, showing how SIEs relax but also rehearse their performances in order to reduce any identity gaps triggered by the new organisational and national context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how disadvantaged young adults construct a positive work-related identity in their transition from unemployment to employment, and what enables or constrains a successful transition.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 29 apprentices of a reemployment program (Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen). The qualitative data were complemented by data on participants’ reemployment status one year after the program ended.

Identity construction was not preceded by clear motives or “possible selves.” Rather, serendipitous events led to participation in the reemployment program, after which provisional selves seemed to emerge through different pathways. The data also suggested that disadvantaged young adults had to discard their old selves to consolidate their new identity.

A successful transition from unemployment to employment may require that old selves must be discarded before new selves can fully emerge. Given that our qualitative design limits the generalizability of the findings, the authors propose a process model that deserves further empirical examination.

A clear employment goal is not always required for the success of a reemployment intervention: interventions should rather focus on accommodating the emergence and consolidation of provisional selves. Yet, such programs can be simultaneously effective and unhelpful: especially group identification should be monitored.

Most research assumes that people are driven by specific goals when making a transition. The current study shows otherwise: the factors that enable or constrain a successful transition are not to be found in people’s goals, but rather in the process of identity construction itself.

The purpose of this paper is to expand recent discussions of research practice in organizational ethnography by engaging in a reflexive examination of the ethnographer's situated identity work across different research spaces: academic, personal and the research site itself.

Examines concerns with the traditional notion of “being there” as it applies to ethnography in contemporary organization studies and, through a confessional account exploring the author's own experiences as a PhD student conducting ethnography, considers “being […] where?” using the analytic framework of situated identity work.

Identifies both opportunities and challenges for organizational ethnographers facing the question of “being […] where?” through highlighting the situated nature of researchers’ identity work in, across and between different (material and virtual) research spaces.

The paper provides researchers with prompts to examine their own situated identity work, which may prove particularly useful for novice researchers and their supervisors, while also identifying the potential for incorporating these ideas within organizational ethnography more broadly.

The paper offers situated identity work as a means to provide renewed analytic vigour to the confessional genre whilst highlighting new opportunities for reflexive and critical ethnographic research practice.

Identities are central to the regulation and control of knowledge‐intensive work. Rather than being managed on the basis of technocratic or bureaucratic control, knowledge intensive firms are employing knowledge workers who enact and internalize identities and roles that guide everyday behaviour in organizations. However, the concept of identity is relational and contingent on local conditions and interactions in everyday practices, different identities may be complementary or even contradictory. The paper aims to show that consultants are altering between being experts and speaking‐partners, two identities that in many ways are complementary but also mutually reinforcing.

This is a case study of a Swedish management consulting firm, Johnson Consulting.

The challenge for consultants is to be capable of effortlessly transgressing the line of demarcation between the two identities – expert and speaking‐partner – and their accompanying practices for the benefit of the client. Skilled consultants are trained at moving back and forth between these positions while less experienced consultants may find it intimidating to lose their position as expert.

The paper concludes that knowledge‐intensive firms such as management consulting firms should articulate and elaborate on the various identities mobilized in everyday work when encountering clients.

The paper uses the literature on identities in knowledge‐intensive firms and an empirical study of management consultants to show that knowledge‐intensive work is always operating on the level of identities and self‐images. Understanding knowledge intensive firms thus demands an understanding of how co‐workers perceive their own role.