‘I don’t know what I am doing!’: Surfacing struggles of managerial identity work

Abstract

Recent work contends that management education provides an important space for managers' identity work. However, it is also recognised that much of what is currently offered constrains rather than enables managers' identity work. Against this background, I present material which provides important practical possibilities to managers for more realistic and helpful forms of identity work, and theoretically also add to the development of a more nuanced understanding of managerial identity work processes. Drawing on interviews with a range of managers, I offer rare empirical evidence which illustrates the ordinarily suppressed emotional struggles of the mismatch between social identities of manager and self identities. In this way, Icontribute to current theoretical offerings to demonstrate the centrality of emotions to processes of becoming. In turn, I propose that exploration of these emotions offers management educators important possibilities for facilitating managers' identity work.

Becoming Business-Like

“…The first stage of analysis was developed by reading and rereading the fieldnotes and reflexive diaries, reflecting on which experiences were most salient (Hay, 2014). The second stage involved crafting these experiences into ethnographic stories.…”

Gender Differences and Professional Identities in Health and Engineering

“…A person's profession represents much more than their aptitudes and functions; it is a form of life to be assumed, as the relation between the workers and their profession is characterized by the engagement and by the feeling of identity and compliance with its attributes. The professional identity, therefore, plays a vital role in how individuals give meaning to our work environment and manage their careers; it is an important input for the construction of work identity (Dubar, 2015;Hay, 2014;Miscenko & Day, 2016).…”

Managers’ social support: Facilitators and hindrances for seeking support at work

“…Arenas that are not created by the organization, and therefore not under its control, become a safe space [76][77][78] because the exchange of support is under the control of the individual manager.…”

“…Previous research has shown that managerial courses facilitates the acquisition of social support [31,[46][47][48]. Management programmes have also been suggested to be safe spaces, separated from managers' daily work, that allow them to build or strengthen their identity as managers, because they are reluctant to entrust or allow their workplace to be a part of that identity work [48,[77][78]. In this study vocational courses were an important arena for access to social support, as they gave the managers knowledge and information and facilitated valuable discussions.…”

“…At these courses the managers also made contact with course participants who were often managers in other organizations, and who could potentially be used for future support. The course was therefore an arena for support because it was a safe space detached from their daily work, and the managers dared to open up and be vulnerable [77][78].…”