Plug in, Ponder, or Pause? How Global Professionals’ Prior Identity Tensions Affected Their Responses to Pandemic-Induced Disruptions
通过对30名全球专业人士在疫情前后的重复访谈，发现他们基于先前身份张力，采取了接入、沉思或暂停三种不同的应对路径，并构建了个人应对重大工作中断的过程模型。
COVID-19 altered employees’ work worldwide and drastically reduced international mobility, affecting millions of global professionals. Drawing on repeated interviews with a sample of 30 global professionals before and after the start of the pandemic, we explored how global professionals’ prior experiences and specific characteristics of the pandemic influenced their interpretations of and responses to the disruption. We discovered three response pathways. First, participants who recounted tensions in how they related to distant others at work before the pandemic viewed the globally shared nature of the disruption as an opportunity to alleviate these tensions by plugging in to bond with others. Second, respondents who had experienced ambivalence regarding their work interpreted the pandemic-induced travel restrictions as an opportunity to ease the ambivalence by pondering over their work identity. Third, participants who experienced discrepancies between their local self and their mobile aspirational self pre-pandemic interpreted the pandemic and the associated travel bans as a threat to their aspirations and momentarily paused their identity work during the pandemic, in keeping with the event’s temporariness. Through our discoveries, we develop a process model of how individuals navigate major work disruptions, and we advance the identity and global mobility literatures.