Work, Meaning, and Multiple Identities

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Work, Meaning, and Multiple Identities
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Framing

• Growing interest around the inter-relationships
  among identity / identification, meaning, and
  work
• Understanding how we make it all work multiple
  roles, multiple identities, multiple meanings
• Designing new study with several colleagues at U
  of Illinois (such as Teresa) want general and
  specific feedback

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Goals

• To examine how organizational practices,
  individual differences in work orientation, and
  organizational affiliation contribute to distinct
  types of identification.
• To examine the effect of these distinct types of
  identification (4) on organizational outcomes.

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Model The Big Picture

• Organizational
• Practices
• work
• social context

• Experienced
• Meaningfulness
• in working
• at work

Patterns of Identification
Professional Identification
Low
High

• Work Orientation
• job
• career (A) (B)
• calling

Organizational Commitment
Professional Identifier
Non- identified
Low
Organizational Identification
Org. Citizenship Behaviors
Org. Identifier
Dual Identifier
High

• Affiliation
• proximity
• temporal factors
• administrative control
• social linkages

Job Satisfaction
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Proposed Context

• Medical context (2 health care systems 1
  religiously affiliated)
• Numerous professional groups
• Different backgrounds, training, certification,
  status orientation, job perceptions, ideologies
• Different levels of identification with
  profession and organization

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Identification Patterns

• Organizational Professional
• Assume that Identification is not fixed pie
  (can simultaneously identify with numerous
  targets)
• Professional identifiers (e.g., cosmopolitans)
• Organizational identifiers (e.g., locals)
• Non-identifiers (within workplace)
• Dual identifiers

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Organizational Practices

• Work changing what members do, changing the
  nature of the job tasks
• meaningfulness in working
• stronger link to professional identification?
• Social Context changing various aspects of the
  social context (e.g., culture, work
  relationships)
• meaningfulness at work
• stronger link to organizational identification?

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Work Orientation

• Job economic focus
• predictive of Non-Identifiers?
• Career A achievement focus advancement within
  an organization
• predictive of Organization Identifiers?
• Career B achievement focus advancement across
  organizations
• predictive of Professional Identifiers?
• Calling fulfillment, transcendence
• predictive of Dual Identifiers or Professional
  Identifiers?

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Affiliation
Adapted from Pfeffer and Baron (1988)
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Affiliation

• Still working on specific hypotheses for
  affiliation
• In general, we believe that lack of proximity,
  and working alone will have a larger influence on
  organizational identification than professional
  identification

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Experienced Meaningfulness

• Want to assess
• meaningfulness in working
• meaningfulness at work
• No set measures that we know of likely be the
  focus of qualitative analysis
• Need to determine whether or not to split
  different aspects of meaningfulness at work
  (e.g., culture and relationships)

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Organizational Commitment

• Might different types of commitment be related to
  different identification patterns (and work
  orientations)?
• Continuance non-identifiers (and job-oriented)?
• Affective organizational and dual (and career
  A)?
• Normative professional and dual (and career B
  and calling)?

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Other Outcomes

• OCBs e.g., task conscientiousness, helping
  others, participating in organizational politics,
  positive attitudes
• Job Satisfaction

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Need Specific Feedback About

• Career A and B
• Does this distinction make sense
• Will we get differences between career B and
  callings?
• Non-traditional outcome variables
• Can we do more than OCBs and job satisfaction?
• Logic of predictions?
• Missing aspects of affiliation?
• Capturing meaningfulness in and at work?
• Look for transcendent practices?

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Thank you!
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Meaningfulness in and at Work(Pratt Ashforth
2003)
Meaningfulness inWorking Practices
Meaningfulness atWork Practices
Membership Where Do I Belong?
Role What Am I Doing?
Identity Who Am I?
MeaningfulnessWhy Am I Here?
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Organizational Practices
Meaning at Work
Meaning in Working
Building cultures, identities, ideologies
Job redesign
Employee involvement
Transformational, charismatic or visionary
leadership
Recruitment
Path-goal leadership
Selection
Socialization
Building communities
Nurturing callings
Providing a cosmology Promoting psychological
safety Enacting with integrity
Transcendence