From Synchronizing to Harmonizing: The Process of Authenticating Multiple Work Identities
基于48位多重职业者的五年数据,研究人们如何在多个工作角色中培养和维持真实性,发现认证过程从同步个体角色身份演变为和谐更广泛的工作自我。
To understand how people cultivate and sustain authenticity in multiple, often shifting, work roles, we analyze qualitative data gathered over five years from a sample of 48 plural careerists—people who choose to simultaneously hold and identify with multiple jobs. We find that people with multiple work identities struggle with being, feeling, and seeming authentic both to their contextualized work roles and to their broader work selves. Further, practices developed to cope with these struggles change over time, suggesting a two-phase emergent process of authentication in which people first synchronize their individual work role identities and then progress toward harmonizing a more general work self. This study challenges the notion that consistency is the core of authenticity, demonstrating that for people with multiple valued identities, authenticity is not about being true to one identity across time and contexts, but instead involves creating and holding cognitive and social space for several true versions of oneself that may change over time. It suggests that authentication is the emergent, socially constructed process of both determining who one is and helping others see who one is.