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Week 9 Critical perspectives on management and organisations (How do…
Week 9
Critical perspectives on management and organisations
An ideal worker & the professional identity
Who is an ‘ideal worker’?
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
Expected to prioritise work ahead of family, personal needs, and even health
What is a professional identity?
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 expect their workers to conform to the ideal worker image
This expectation has lead to persisting gender inequality in the workplace
Consequences of using integrated identity management strategies for professionals
External perceptions and performance evaluation
High performance ratings
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
Gender differences
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
Reasons： 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
Integrated identity management strategies for multiple audiences
Combining passing and revealing
Audience status
Closeness of relationship
Perceived access to formal accomodations
Extremity of the conflict experiences
Spillover of perceptions across audiences
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. sam-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-structruing 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
How do organisations control professional identity?
STRUCTURE OF WORK
The successful performance of the professional role been contingent upon always prioritising work demands all over 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, non-monetary awards - 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.
Workshop Reading: Off-ramps and on-ramps
push and pull factors cause women to leave work
pull factors
caring for parents
health issues
children
push factors
job was unfulfilling/not meaningful
work is too demanding
women want to return to work
most common reason for returning is needing money
93% want to return
only 74% actually rejoin
women lose earning power when they leave
Strategies to help women
provide flexibility in the day
provide outlets for altruism
create reduced-hour jobs
nurture ambition
remove stigma
stop burning bridges
https://youtu.be/18uDutylDa4