Identity at work

Behaviour / 08 July 2009

From concealing our quick temper to suppressing our sexuality, we all alter our identity at work to some extent. While playing down some aspects of our personality won’t hurt, a non-stop Jekyll and Hyde act will undoubtedly harm performance. How can managers make sure they – and their teams – are true to themselves yet aligned with organisational values? Steve Coomber reports

In 1973, the book Sybil was published, recounting the story of Shirley Ardell Mason, a commercial artist in the US. While Mason’s work was unremarkable (she was a college art teacher), one aspect of her life was deeply controversial.

For Mason was said to have suffered from dissociative identity disorder, exhibiting 16 separate and different identities.

Most of us do not have to struggle to cope with multiple identities as Mason did, yet our identity – both personal and social – plays a very important part in our physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.

With UK workers putting in some of the longest hours in Europe (one in eight people work a 48-hour week or more), the issue of identity in the workplace is increasingly important for both employees and organisations.

 

While dissociative identity disorder is rare (its very existence is disputed), people do have different versions of ‘self’, depending on a range of factors.

‘People arrive at a sense of identity by all sorts of mechanisms, and it depends whether you’re talking about personal identity or social identity,’ says Abigail Marks, a reader in work and employment at Heriot-Watt University, who has spent over ten years researching the subject. ‘Personal identity is about who you are as an individual and all the external factors that have contributed to how you define yourself. Social identity is about your identity in social situations, as a member of a group.’

In reality, we all have multiple social identities, says Marion Fortin, lecturer in organisational behaviour at Durham Business School. ‘Everyone belongs simultaneously to different groups. I would not only see myself as a member of Durham Business School, I would also define myself as a member of the academic community at large.

ID parade

‘So typically people don’t only have the social identity of their work team and their organisation, they also have the identity of their profession, and maybe, within their profession, they have other identities where they belong to different groups. Each of these different groups can be important for the self, and losing any one of these groups can be distressing.’

The concepts of identity and work are becoming increasingly intertwined. This is partly because work has become more and more central to people’s lives, but could also be to do with factors such as the breakdown of traditional family structures.

The upshot is that for many of us, identity from outside the workplace has become less important than workplace identity. Just consider how most people describe themselves to others. ‘Within five minutes of talking to someone you don’t know, they will tell you what they do and who they work for,’ says Marks.

At the same time, our identification with the organisation we work for helps to determine our performance at work. ‘What research finds repeatedly is that people who identify with a group are much more willing to engage with and help the group,’ says Fortin. ‘Identifying with the group will lower your stress levels and heighten your self-esteem and your willingness to engage with the group fully. That is why it is so important for managers to understand that identification actually has an impact on people’s performance.’

The perfect arrangement, it seems, is when an individual’s identity is aligned with the organisation, department and team that they work with. Unfortunately, research suggests this is rarely the case.

A survey by Vodafone – Changing Faces: How we adapt our identity at work – found that 58% of employees felt it necessary to change their identity to some extent in the workplace. Six per cent – designated the ‘identity stressed’ – even said they changed everything about themselves at work. This included hiding gender identity and changing accents and personality traits, such as becoming more assertive and social or less open and extrovert.

Some modification of behaviour in the workplace may be beneficial to both employer and employee, but too much deviation from the true self is likely to have negative results. Many of the employees in the study felt such changes in identity had an adverse effect on their sleep, self esteem, confidence, individuality and social life – and, no doubt, their performance.

Fake it to make it

‘People who make themselves into an entirely different person at work, particularly because they think they are in some way conforming to some external idea of what is worthwhile, are storing up danger for themselves,’ says Paul Thompson, a senior consultant at organisational effectiveness advisers YSC.

In the most extreme cases, finding another job is probably the best solution. This is not an option for everyone, however. Fortunately, for the many people who lack perfect alignment of personal and workplace identities, they can still find some harmony.

‘It’s important for people to pay attention to the things they feel they can relate to, or that have personal meaning for them in their jobs,’ says Rob Briner, head of the School of Management and Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London.

‘Maybe, for example, you don’t enjoy the technical, but you really like dealing with customers and clients. If you can focus on the areas that you find a connection with, you are more likely to identify with your job.’

For some people, separating work and home life is the best way to prevent identity conflict. One civil servant, who was an operational policy advisor at HMRC before retiring, says: ‘Given the nature of the job that I did, which was not the most popular job in the world, I saw from the senior members that it was important to keep a detachment from what you did in the day and what you did in your own life, so you didn’t let it take over.’

If workplace identity becomes all-consuming, as some organisations seem to want, it can lead to significant problems should an individual stop working.

‘When people are unemployed or retire, there’s good evidence that it can be detrimental in terms of mental and physical wellbeing,’ says Briner. ‘That is partly because they don’t have anything to identify with.’

‘It happens to a lot of people who retire,’ agrees Marks. ‘They suddenly do not know what to do with themselves because they have lost a part of their identity. They have become a retired person, rather than a director or member of a particular organisation.’

Stress, loss of self-esteem and increased anxiety are all often associated with the loss of identity that accompanies losing your job. There are ways to lessen these negative consequences, however.

‘One thing that seems to mitigate those effects is when individuals who become unemployed engage in work-like activity,’ says Briner. ‘They get hobbies, they get projects, they do voluntary work. They set goals, they have challenges, they’re undertaking tasks – they probably get frustrated and they get satisfaction from completing things.

‘People are quite obsessed now with keeping busy in retirement. I think that’s partly because people recognise that suddenly this big chunk of identity is taken away. It’s partly about filling time but it’s also about having purpose and through that comes meaning in terms of identity.’

The question of workplace identity raises a number of important issues for managers. Authenticity is currently a popular concept in leadership and HR thinking. But how realistic is it for an employee to be truly authentic – to bring themselves, warts and all, to the workplace – and is that really desirable?

Be yourself – but better

‘It is very difficult to be authentic all the time,’ says Darren Robson, executive coach in organisational change at HR consultants Penna.

‘If you are completely authentic – very honest and candid, for example – you might say inappropriate things and you will upset people, so you always have to be aware of the culture of the organisation as well. There are few organisations where it is acceptable for you to be completely who you are.’

As adults we have to manage certain things for ourselves, including our identity, but the situation is complicated. Some commentators suggest that, with the UK’s increased reliance on the services industry, people are selling certain emotional displays or attitudes to their employer – because that is what is required for effective interaction with customers and clients. However, the idea of everyone having to give 110% and bring everything about themselves into work can backfire.

‘People can find it intrusive,’ says Briner. ‘Does it ultimately make people do the job any better? Suppose some of that self is not very nice, or helpful, or attractive, or useful. If an employee is really horrible to their children, do you want them to be horrible to the people they manage at work, or would you rather they left that bit of their identity at home?’

There are also other issues at play. Many organisations have operated very dominant organisational cultures – IBM, Microsoft and more recently Google, for example. Employee self-selection might seem sensible: a dominant corporate culture discourages individuals with a mismatched identity from joining. And doesn’t greater alignment between individual and organisational identity mean better performance? But this approach may threaten diversity, innovation, competitiveness and even the organisation’s long term survival.

‘As a manager I want people to be themselves and to have their own identities,’ says Thompson, ‘but I also want the organisational culture as a cohesive force within my organisation, so there is a tension with that. An organisation that tends to think about culture as a sort of a cloning mechanism, that is too prescriptive, is going to wind up in real difficulties. Sooner or later, the intellectualand inter-personal gene pool narrows so much that the company can’t adapt effectively to its environment.’

Kudos counts

Another issue is status. In a world where flatter organisations are touted as the future, status symbols such as job titles, private offices and parking spaces are being abandoned. Yet, these apparently meaningless vestiges of status have powerfully symbolic meaning to many employees’ sense of identity. Firms remove them at their peril.

‘Those artefacts of status or identity do seem to be quite important to people, particularly if you’re not getting much else through your work,’ says Briner. ‘Take title inflation, where somebody who is just called a manager becomes an assistant associate director or executive director. In some contexts, people do really value those things. Take, for example, what some organisations are doing with their headquarters buildings – reducing the size, then half the staff can no longer have a desk. That can cause a lot of trouble.’

So workplace identity is a complex subject. There are many challenges associated with the issue but few definite solutions. For employees, however, one thing is apparent. The greater the self-awareness and understanding you have of your identity – who you are and how others see you – the more likely you are to achieve work satisfaction, the better your performance will be and the fewer problems if you are out of work.