Shattering the Myth of Separate Worlds: Negotiating Nonwork Identities at Work

How much of our self is defined by our work? Fundamental changes in the social organization of work are destabilizing the relationship between work and the self. As a result, parts of the self traditionally considered outside the domain of work—that is, nonwork identities—are increasingly affected by organizations and occupations. Based on an interdisciplinary review of literature on identity and work, we develop a model of how people negotiate nonwork identities (e.g., national, gender, family) in the context of organizational/occupational pressures and personal preferences regarding this identity. We propose that the dual forces of pressures and preferences vary from inclusion (e.g., incorporating the nonwork identity within the work identity) to exclusion (e.g., keeping the identities separate). We suggest that the alignment or misalignment of these pressures and preferences shapes people’s experience of the power relationship between themselves and their organization/occupation and affects how they manage their nonwork identities. We describe how people enact different nonwork identity management strategies—namely, assenting to, complying with, resisting, or inverting the pressures—and delineate the consequences of these strategies for people and their organizations/occupations.