Identity negotiation at work

Upon initiating relationships, people engage in a process of identity negotiation through which they establish their respective identities. Once established, people's identities define their mutual expectations, obligations, and indeed, the very nature of their relationships. This chapter presents a rudimentary theory of identity negotiation, with emphasis on how such negotiations unfold in the workplace. We first discuss the nature and history of identity negotiation, noting similarities and differences between identity negotiation and related constructs. Next we describe the successive phases of the identity negotiation process and identify the principles that ideally govern how that process operates in work contexts. We then discuss how identity negotiation processes may be leveraged for organizational change and how the state of identity congruence may contribute to innovation. We conclude by noting questions that remain for future research on identity negotiation.     

Reconsidering Work–Life Balance Debates: Challenging Limited Understandings of the ‘Life’ Component in the Context of Ethnic Minority Women's Experiences

This article argues for a broader, more diverse approach to the ‘life’ component of the work–life balance equation. This is discussed within the context of ethnic minority women's experiences of balancing their work and personal life, contending that there are restrictions in our understanding of lives that may fall outside the standard white western model. A key aim of this work is to question existing understandings of work–life balance debates that focus almost exclusively on gender and childcare, ignoring issues around ethnicity, culture and religion. A social constructionist framework was adopted for this study, which acknowledges an interaction between structure, culture and agency. Primary data were collected in the form of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 26 minority female participants, 15 ethnic minority men, eight white women and six white men, all employed across a range of industries and occupations. Although the focus of this paper primarily lies with ethnic minority women's experiences, data from ethnic minority men, white women and men are incorporated in the analysis where appropriate or useful. The empirical data have indicated that both white and ethnic minority women struggle with balancing work and personal life demands to a greater extent than their male counterparts. However, an ethnicity or cultural dimension was apparent, as ethnic minority women often had to deal with additional cultural, community or religious demands. It is argued, nevertheless, that a deeper understanding of the diversity within groups is necessary to avoid essentializing experiences and needs. By acknowledging different forms of life, a more realistic analysis can take place which can inform organizational policy and practice.     

Men Doing and Undoing Gender at Work: A Review and Research Agenda

While research on gender in organizations has not only documented sustained gender inequality, it has also offered an understanding of how gender is enacted through doing and undoing gender. An underexplored aspect concerns how men can do and undo gender to support or hinder gender equality processes in organizations. Doing gender is then understood as creating gender difference while undoing gender would conversely mean to reduce gender difference. The former is supporting gender inequality while the latter means moving toward gender equality. This article therefore provides a systematic review of empirical articles that discuss how men are doing and undoing gender within an organizational context. It is shown that undoing gender practices of men in organizations are under‐researched and a research agenda of how men can undo gender at work is thus developed. This article makes a two‐fold contribution: first it offers a refinement of doing and undoing gender approaches and second, it develops a research agenda for exploring how men can undo gender at work.     

The Sound of Silence. Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Discrimination in ‘Inclusive Organizations’

Most studies on diversity and discrimination in the workplace have focused on ‘visible’ minorities such as gender or race, often neglecting the experiences of invisible minorities such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workers. In this paper we explore the practices of inclusion/exclusion of LGBTs in the workplace in Italian social cooperatives, which are specifically founded to create employment for people who are disadvantaged in the labour market. The study examines how organizations, which have an ethos focused on inclusion and mainly employ workers from specific social minority groups, manage the inclusion of LGBT workers. We also explore the experience of LGBT workers within these organizations. The paper reports that the culture of silence existing in the five organizations studied prevents LGBT employees from constructing a work identity which encompasses their sexual identity and prevents the organizations from achieving their aim of being fully inclusive workplaces.     

Testing the gender similarities hypothesis: differences in subjective task value and motivation to transfer training

ABSTRACT

Are female and male trainees similar or different in their reaction to training programmes, specifically regarding their subjective task value and motivation to transfer? According to the gender similarities hypothesis, women and men are alike on most psychological variables. However, according to research in organizational behaviour, female and male employees differ on certain aspects, such as their job satisfaction and work identity. To test these two views on gender similarities and differences in the context of human resource development and training evaluation, the present study examined the extent to which gender moderated reactions to training. Based on the expectancy-value theory of motivation and self-determination theory, a web-based questionnaire was used to measure six training reactions: intrinsic value, attainment value, utility value, perceived relative cost, autonomous motivation to transfer, and controlled motivation to transfer. The results indicated that women and men differed in their ratings of attainment value but were similar for the remaining five reaction measures. These outcomes support the gender similarities hypothesis. The findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications for modelling gender effects in HRD research and their practical significance for promoting training effectiveness and transfer of training.     

The Importance of Role Models and Demographic Context for Senior Women's Work Identity Development

The lack of senior female role models continues to be cited as a key barrier to women's career success. Yet there is little academic research into the gendered aspects of role modelling in organizations, or the utility of role models at a senior level. The paper starts with a review of papers examining the construction of role models in organizational settings. This leads to the inclusion of two related areas – organizational demographics as the contextual factor affecting the availability of role models and how they are perceived, and work identity formation as a possible key explanatory factor behind the link between the lack of senior female role models and the lack of career progression to top organizational levels. The literature looking at social theories of identity formation is then considered from a gender perspective. The key gaps identified are that while the behavioural value of role models has been well documented, a better understanding is needed of how gender and organizational demography influence the role modelling process. Importantly, the symbolic value and possibly other values of female role models in the identity construction of senior women require further in‐depth investigation. Finally, this review calls for a more integrated approach to the study of role models and work identity formation, pulling together literatures on organizational demography, the cognitive construal of role models and their importance for successful work identity formation in senior women.     

UNDER PRESSURE: GENDER DIFFERENCES IN OUTPUT QUALITY AND QUANTITY UNDER COMPETITION AND TIME CONSTRAINTS

Gender gaps in the workplace are widespread. One explanation for gender inequality stems from the effects of the interaction between competition and two pressure sources, namely, task stereotypes and time constraints. This study uses a laboratory experiment to find that the gender gap in performance under competition and preferences for competition can be partly explained by the differential responses of men and women to the above pressures. In particular, while women underperform the men in a high‐pressure math‐based tournament, women greatly increase their performance levels and their willingness to compete in a low‐pressure verbal environment, such that they actually surpass the men. This effect appears largely due to the fact that extra time in a verbal competition improves the quality of women’s work, reducing their mistake share. On the other hand, men use this extra time to increase only the quantity of work, which results in a greater relative number of mistakes. A labor market study suggests that the nature of the job and the stress level are correlated with the gender gap in the labor market in a manner consistent with the results of my experiment.     

Gender Differences in Risk Perception: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives

A substantial body of risk research indicates that women and men differ in their perceptions of risk. This paper discusses how they differ and why. A review of a number of existing empirical studies of risk perception points at several problems, regarding what gender differences are found in such studies, and how these differences are accounted for. Firstly, quantitative approaches, which have so far dominated risk research, and qualitative approaches give different, sometimes even contradictory images of women's and men's perceptions of risk. Secondly, the gender differences that appear are often left unexplained, and even when explanations are suggested, these are seldom related to gender research and gender theory in any systematic way. This paper argues that a coherent, theoretically informed gender perspective on risk is needed to improve the understanding of women's and men's risk perceptions. An analysis of social theories of gender points out some relations and distinctions which should be considered in such a perspective. It is argued that gender structures, reflected in gendered ideology and gendered practice, give rise to systematic gender differences in the perception of risk. These gender differences may be of different kinds, and their investigation requires the use of qualitative as well as quantitative methods. In conclusion, the arguments about gender and risk perception are brought together in a theoretical model which might serve as a starting point for further research.     

Investigating Unpaid Overtime Working among the Part‐time Workforce

This paper considers whether unpaid overtime working relates to contracted working hours (i.e. whether an employee works part‐time or full‐time) in Britain. It uses the authoritative 2004 British data set Workplace Employment Relations Survey to derive a sample of 4,530 workers, from 735 workplace establishments, who worked unpaid overtime. It tests hypotheses linking contracted working hours to unpaid overtime, and whether this link is moderated by gender, occupational group and the availability of flexible working arrangements. Part‐time workers were found to work significantly more unpaid overtime hours compared with their full‐time counterparts. Gender, occupation and flexible working practices moderated this relationship, where the extent to which part‐timers work more unpaid overtime than their full‐time counterparts was greater for men than for women, was greater for professional/managerial part‐time workers compared with other occupations, and was more evident in establishments less likely to offer flexible working arrangements. The findings raise concerns about the exploitation of part‐time workers.     

Religious Social Identities in the Hybrid Self‐presentations of Sikh Businesspeople

This paper explores the identity work practices of Thai Sikh businesspeople. The paper focuses on two important social identities in participants’ self‐presentations – those derived from religious (Sikh) and western business discourses – and identifies powerful tensions in their hybrid identity work. Conducting discourse analysis on identity work practices within interview settings, the authors explore how participants resolve, accommodate or reject these discursive tensions while attempting stable and coherent hybrid self‐presentations. They identify several different forms of hybridity, including what they term ‘equipollence’, which occurs when two equally powerful, contradictory discourses are incorporated in self‐presentations, producing potentially irresolvable intersections and leading to a lack of coherence. Contributions are made to the literatures on religion and work, hybrid identity work processes and social identities.     

An organizational approach to undoing gender: The unlikely case of offshore oil platforms

This case study of two offshore oil platforms illustrates how an organizational initiative designed to enhance safety and effectiveness created a culture that unintentionally released men from societal imperatives for “manly” behavior, prompting them to let go of masculine-image concerns and to behave instead in counter-stereotypical ways. Rather than proving how tough, proficient, and cool-headed they were, as was typical of men in other dangerous workplaces, platform workers readily acknowledged their physical limitations, publicly admitted their mistakes, and openly attended to their own and others’ feelings. Importantly, platform workers did not replace a conventional image of masculinity with an unconventional one and then set out to prove the new image—revealing mistakes strategically, for example, or competing in displays of sensitivity. Instead, the goal of proving one's masculine credentials, conventional or otherwise, appeared to no longer hold sway in men's workplace interactions. Building on West and Zimmerman's (1987: 129) now classic articulation of gender as “the product of social doings,” we describe this organizationally induced behavior as “undoing” gender. We use this case, together with secondary case data drawn from 10 published field studies of men doing dangerous work, to induce a model of how organizational cultures equip men to “do” and “undo” gender at work.     

Arguments for Testing Ethnic Identity and Acculturation as Factors in Risk Judgments

Understanding of risk views in multiethnic societies and in a globalizing world may be enhanced by use of measures of ethnic identity and acculturation. Ethnic identity includes such attributes as positive attitudes about one's ethnic group and a sense of belonging to it, voluntary and frequent association with other ethnic group members, and ethnic practices (preferred music, food, language; attendance at ethnic festivities). Acculturation is absorption of the "host" society's cultural norms, beliefs, attitudes and behavior patterns by immigrants, or by other groups historically excluded from the larger society. Both generic and ethnicity-specific measures of these concepts are available in the literature. This Perspective reviews the literature on risk implications of these concepts, how the nature of these measures presents both opportunities and challenges to risk researchers, and the degree to which ethnic identity and acculturation may be correlated with sociodemographic factors. Conceptual and methodological suggestions are made for risk research using these concepts, and hypotheses are offered about what such research might find.     

Impact of the psychosocial work environment on registered absence from work: A two-year longitudinal study using the IPAW cohort

During the Intervention Project on Absence and Well-being (IPAW), a 5-year project conducted in Denmark, we investigated psychosocial work environment factors as independent predictors of the number of absence days per year. The present two-year longitudinal study used the IPAW cohort, but was not intended to study intervention effects, which will be reported later. Data were derived from baseline questionnaires and employers’ registers of absence for 1919 participants (1305 women, 614 men, mainly in low-skilled jobs) in different occupations from 52 workplaces. These workplaces included municipal care, municipal technical services and a large pharmaceutical company. Analyses were performed by Poisson regression accounting for over-dispersion. After controlling for age, family type, health behaviours and physical work environment variables, we found that high levels of decision authority predicted low absence rates in both women and men. We tested two new psychosocial constructs developed for this study: Predictability (relating to being informed on future events at work) and Meaning of Work (relating to how meaningful and useful the work is perceived to be). Higher Predictability was a significant predictor of lower absence rates in men. This study adds to the body of evidence that the psychosocial working environment influences absence and should therefore be considered to be an important target for intervention.     

Impact of the psychosocial work environment on registered absence from work: A two-year longitudinal study using the IPAW cohort

During the Intervention Project on Absence and Well-being (IPAW), a 5-year project conducted in Denmark, we investigated psychosocial work environment factors as independent predictors of the number of absence days per year. The present two-year longitudinal study used the IPAW cohort, but was not intended to study intervention effects, which will be reported later. Data were derived from baseline questionnaires and employers' registers of absence for 1919 participants (1305 women, 614 men, mainly in low-skilled jobs) in different occupations from 52 workplaces. These workplaces included municipal care, municipal technical services and a large pharmaceutical company. Analyses were performed by Poisson regression accounting for over-dispersion. After controlling for age, family type, health behaviours and physical work environment variables, we found that high levels of decision authority predicted low absence rates in both women and men. We tested two new psychosocial constructs developed for this study: Predictability (relating to being informed on future events at work) and Meaning of Work (relating to how meaningful and useful the work is perceived to be). Higher Predictability was a significant predictor of lower absence rates in men. This study adds to the body of evidence that the psychosocial working environment influences absence and should therefore be considered to be an important target for intervention.     

Gender and nationality pay gaps in light of organisational theories

This paper analyses wage inequality with respect to gender and nationality within German establishments. It is a large-scale analysis based on linked employer-employee data from the Institute for Employment Research (LIAB). Wage inequality is measured as the intra-establishment pay gap by gender and nationality, taking into account that human capital may not be equally distributed across the different groups of employees. Consistent with economic theories of discrimination we find significant pay gaps by gender and nationality, even taking into consideration employees’ qualifications. We can show that pay differentials between men and women are much larger on average than those between Germans and non-Germans, and that both pay gaps exhibit a tremendous variation across establishments. Drawing on organisational theories we inquire as to how selected firm characteristics are related to the variation of these intra-firm pay gaps and derive hypotheses about which establishments have a greater incentive and/or are more able to pursue wage equality in their workforces. By use of regression analysis we then investigate whether variables that reflect the firms’ social, institutional and cultural environment and their resource requirements are empirically related to the sizes of the pay gaps. The results are rather ambiguous, suggesting larger, innovating and foreign-owned establishments with a larger share of non-German employees and with a collective bargaining agreement to have smaller gaps, particularly with respect to gender.     

Key Issues in Women’s Representation in Bureaucracy: Lessons from South Asia

This paper discusses the position of women in the civil services in South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). The majority of women are in lower level positions. It is rare to find women in higher and mid-level positions and in professional and administrative occupations. Despite constitutional guarantees and other governmental initiatives to remove gender discrimination from the civil services of these countries, women continue to fight against a variety of odds to attain career success. The objective of this paper is to make a comparative analysis of the factors accounting for the successful advancement of women in top positions in the civil services of these three countries, and to analyse factors that may impede women from making more progress. A cultural approach has been adopted in this study, emphasizing that the social contexts within which institutions operate shape the manner in which institutions behave and act. Based on extensive field work, the study maps female civil servants’ opinions on a number of factors that impede their career prospects in the civil service. In the conclusion, some policy recommendations are made as a way to address the issue.     

Generation Y graduates and career transition: Perspectives by gender

The aim of this paper is to explore, by gender, UK Generation Y graduates’ views on their career transition after graduation from under-graduate business programmes. Following a literature review, the empirical work takes the form of an on-line questionnaire with business school graduates from a post-1992 Scottish University in five recent academic sessions. Gendered nuances are found in several aspects of the respondents’ views on their career transition, including statistically significant differences in: more women continuing their student job after graduation; women being more accepting of starting after graduation in a non-graduate level job; and more women than men encountering gender discrimination in the workplace. The identified nuances and differences appear to be setting the genders on diverging career tracks as early as the transition from university, in that they seem to signal more career progress, even advantage, among the men than the women.     

Corporate reputation: Meaning and measurement

Corporate reputation has attracted interest from a wide range of academic disciplines. It is also a growing focus for business and media attention. This paper examines the construct of corporate reputation, first by untangling the terminological problems that have been caused by the interdisciplinary nature of much of the earlier work in the area. The construct of reputation and the allied constructs of image and identity are each reviewed. A structure is proposed in which the three constructs can be seen as labelling different but allied concepts. I then move on to consider how reputation has been measured. The paper uncovers considerable confusion in the use of what might appear to be basic terms and links this to a subsequent lack of grounded measurement tools in the sector, until relatively recently. With a clearer understanding of the construct of corporate reputation and the allied constructs of image and identity, researchers are now well placed to test the relationships widely claimed by practitioners between corporate reputation and other variables such as commercial performance and employee and customer satisfaction. The review ends by illustrating some of the issues that can be assessed from the basis of a clearer conceptualization of reputation and its measurement.     

What Risks Do People Perceive in Everyday Life? A Perspective Gained from the Experience Sampling Method (ESM)

The experience sampling method (ESM) was used to collect data from 74 part-time students who described and assessed the risks involved in their current activities when interrupted at random moments by text messages. The major categories of perceived risk were short term in nature and involved "loss of time or materials" related to work and "physical damage" (e.g., from transportation). Using techniques of multilevel analysis, we demonstrate effects of gender, emotional state, and types of risk on assessments of risk. Specifically, females do not differ from males in assessing the potential severity of risks but they see these as more likely to occur. Also, participants assessed risks to be lower when in more positive self-reported emotional states. We further demonstrate the potential of ESM by showing that risk assessments associated with current actions exceed those made retrospectively. We conclude by noting advantages and disadvantages of ESM for collecting data about risk perceptions.