Week 9 - Critical Perspectives on Management and Organisations

Question 1

Who is an ‘ideal worker’?

Answer 1

• Due to a move towards a 24/7/365 work cycle, employees today are expected to prioritise work ahead of family, personal needs, and even health
• Therefore, an ‘ideal worker’ is one who is totally committed to and always available to fulfil his or her work duties
• Employees who embrace this expectation is richly rewarded, especially those performing professional or managerial jobs

Question 2

What is a professional identity?

Answer 2

• Role identities comprise of goals, values, beliefs, norms, interaction styles, and time horizons associated with a given role
• Two main forms of professional identities:
  
  • Expected: employer expectations and beliefs
  • Experienced: own expectations and beliefs
• Organisations employing professionals (e.g. surgeons, consultants, lawyers, academics) expect their workers to conform to the ideal worker image
• When a worker’s experienced professional identity does not meet the ideal worker image (i.e. expected professional identity) conflict arises
• This expectation has lead to persisting gender inequality in the workplace

Question 3

Organisational mechanisms of identity control

Answer 3

• Structure of work
  
  • The successful performance of the professional role been contingent upon always prioritising work demands over all other life demands and therefore always being available to the employer
• Performance evaluations
  
  • Reinforcing the above structure of work by rewarding (e.g. promotions, salary increments, nonmonetary rewards - stars) those who fulfil such ‘expected’ professional identity requirements
• Taken together, the structure of work and the performance evaluation system creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of professionals continuously adopting the ‘expected’ professional identity

Question 4

Congruence vs. conflict

Answer 4

• If an employee’s expected and experienced professional identities are in sync and congruent they are unlikely to experience conflict
• However, a large percentage of professionals experience conflict between the two identities
• Historically, researchers and practitioners focused on women (based on popular gender norms), especially those with young children as being the main cohort of professionals who would experience conflict, recent research indicates that conflict is not only restricted to them

Question 5

How do professionals cope with conflict?

Answer 5

• Professionals cope with conflicting identities by ‘straying’ from the expected identity (i.e. ideal worker image)
• They do so by either passing or revealing
  
  • Passing: intentional or accidental misrepresentation of membership in the favoured group (i.e. expected professional identity)
  • Revealing: intentional or accidental disclosure of non-membership in the favoured group (i.e. expected professional identity)

Question 6

How do professionals cope with conflict?

Tools for straying

Answer 6

Personally altering the structure of work (i.e. passing)

• Focusing on cultivating a local client base
• Working on internal projects to reduce travel time
• Working from home

Seeking assistance in restructuring work (i.e. revealing)

• Applying for reduced workloads
• Seeking parental and/or carer’s leave

Hiding or sharing personal information (i.e. passing and revealing)

• How professionals controlled their personal information dictate whether they use passing or revealing to alter work structure to cope

Question 7

Combining passing and revealing

Answer 7

Factors influencing the use of passing and/or revealing when interacting with audiences

• Audience status
  
  • Pass to high-status while revealing to same-status audiences
• Closeness of relationship
  
  • Pass to those distant while revealing to close friends (colleagues) and mentors
• Perceived access to formal accommodations
  
  • Reveal if having access to formal accommodations (e.g. parental leave) and pass if not
• Extremity of the conflict experienced
  
  • When faced with extreme circumstances in work (e.g. excessively demanding project) or personal life (e.g. death of a close family member) reveal while passing on all other circumstances

Question 8

Spill over of perceptions across audiences

Answer 8

Efforts to pass or reveal to one audience (e.g. high-status) can spillover and influence the perceptions held of the professional by other audiences (e.g. same- or low-level)

• Passing to high-status audiences tends to facilitate passing to equal- or low-status audiences
• Revealing to close colleagues often results in informal re-structuring of work which enables one to pass to wider high-status audiences
• Revealing to high-status audiences often results in revealing to broader audiences across the organisation

Question 9

Consequences of using integrated identity management strategies for professionals

Answer 9

• Gender differences
• External perceptions and performance evaluation

Question 10

Gender differences

Answer 10

• On average:
  
  • Women less likely to engage to identity management strategies that allows passing to high-status audiences and more likely to reveal
  • Men are equally likely to use passing as well as revealing identity management strategies
• The reasons for the above patterns are complex – often attributed to women being more likely to utilise formal accommodations (e.g. parental leave) provided by employer than men
• Senior audience perceptions of professionals dictate the performance evaluation system

Question 11

External perceptions and performance evaluation

Answer 11

• High performance ratings given to:
  
  • Those who embrace the expected professional identity (i.e. congruent with their experienced professional identity)
  • Those who use passing (especially to senior-status audiences) identity management strategies to cope with conflict
• Low performance rating given to those who use revealing (especially to senior-status audiences) identity management strategies to cope with conflict
• High performance rating results in stable and straightforward career paths and at times accelerated advancement while low performance ratings results in missing out on promotions and/or unstable career trajectories