Essay Sample on Professional Identity in the Workplace: Maximizing Productivity

Introduction

For a professional, there are various aspects of identity, and in most cases, the employing firm determines how workers identify themselves. Organizations are interested in select types of professionals willing to behave in a certain way to maximize productivity (Watson and Reissner, 2014, p. 127). Every firm has a particular culture unique to that organization. Professional identity in the workplace is the most essential type of identity but there are other equally important factors in the definition of who a worker is. An engineer in an engineering firm has to be logical, armed with facts, supporting data and relevant calculations. Likewise, an architect's ideas' for unique designs, however cavalier or impractical, are much appreciated in an organization. Companies have different set of professional expectations for particular disciplines.

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The two examples of the engineer and architect are opposites of what a professional is expected to be in their respective areas of specialization. At the core of every workplace is the desire for professionals to fulfill the basic requirements that their specific fields require of them. Professionals are boxed-in in their capacity to have other predominant identities (being themselves). The question of professionals being themselves in the workplace hence has certain limitations; this paper will examine how workers are limited in being themselves but can still maintain elements of their identities using various forms of workplace identity models.

Corporate Brand Identity in the Workplace

According to (Buil, Catalan, & Martinez, 2016) a corporate brand is a company's way of "being, thinking, and behaving." In January and February of 2013, Buil et al. conducted a statistical study on corporate brand identity among UK banking employees using the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), which is a foolproof mathematical approach as it combines factor analysis and multiple regressions (2016). They gathered employee data from 297 validated questionnaires, then prepared reports, tables, and charts. The study found out that, on average employee commitment is directly proportional to brand performance and personal satisfaction.

Managers should endeavor to be creative in improving employee's commitment to the firm to boost productivity- various benefits and rewards systems can do this for achieving milestones. In summary, the study proved that employees have positive attitudes towards being associated with a specific brand but only if they felt appreciated by the banking institution. Appreciation makes employees want to identify with the organization. Rather than employees losing their identity, they find a new way to be themselves: as a part of a larger brand. A freelancer working for himself and by himself can never feel this level loyalty to a company as much as appreciated employees feel loyal to the corporate brand.

In Human Resource Management, employees are, in practice, the body of the organization. The conduct and behaviors of employees should reflect the corporate brand that the firm represents. Corporate brand affects senior employees the most, more than regular workers. Managers and directors are the faces of the company, and so they are expected to conduct themselves in a manner that seeks to extend their firm's business in any way whether at work or away. In a way, the higher the rank of a worker the more their behavior is curtailed by company statutes and codes of conduct.

For example, in many automotive factories, employees are provided with company vehicles, but the models all fall under the umbrella of the same firm. A Toyota factory worker is not expected to drive a Chevrolet to work and vice versa. The reason that firms do this is to ensure that employees form a personal bond to the corporate brand of the workplace. The extent to which organizational brand influences workers' behavior might even go beyond the workplace in some situations. Nowadays, company charters have limits to what employees might post on social media in their free time if it might harm the company brand. Competing firms might even teach their employees to hate their corporate rivals. While it may sound a bit extreme, from a human resource perspective it is good for business since such attitudes motivate workers.

The Socio-Cultural Integration Model

Human resource theories on decision-making emphasize the need for effective communication over socio-cultural relations. Problems arise when the communication channels are working fine, but the employees' morale and performance are down. Workers' socio-cultural interactions are often under-represented in many companies as the primary goal (making profits) overshadows the need for employees to be comfortable and feel at home. However, there are situations where it is beneficial for the company to support the culture of the employees and even monetize it. The socio-cultural integration model emphasizes the need for workers to have a rapport at work.

Xing & Liu (2016) conducted three qualitative case study analyses on mergers and acquisitions in China from the 1980s onwards and found out that socio-cultural identity was a primary consideration for the marriage of state-owned enterprises and private businesses. The study found out that the top administrative and financial companies had leaders who prioritized both employee and customer cultures: using them to make business decisions. What happened with the mergers is that the government let private companies acquire state enterprises and suddenly they started recording profit.

Xi & Liu (2016) found in their case studies that the leaders who took over the businesses paid more attention to people's cultural needs such as employing locals, buying raw materials from them and respecting traditional leaderships. Consequently, the businesses thrived because the new management recognized and integrated their social norms and cultures. In China, the state used to control majority of the companies but that started to change in the 1980s when Human Resource Managers and leaders of state enterprises were encouraged to work together. The success of the mergers and acquisitions relied heavily on how much the administration was willing to accommodate the employees' organizational culture.

The researchers recommended that for developing markets, employees' local culture had to be integrated into the company culture. For example, if a Western company such as Macdonald's wants to set up shop in China, then they must revise their menu- mix their signature foods with local cuisines and employ local chefs. Additionally, leaders and top human resource managers have to have a vested interest in the socio-cultural identity. It means a lot if management occasionally interacts with low-tier employees as if they are of the same rank. Respect for different cultures is paramount for the success of any business. Workers who feel that their way of life is respected are motivated without feeling as if they are exchanging their freedom in the process. Respected workers can freely express their personality- turning work from tedious to enjoyable.

Employees are motivated more if a good number of their bosses are "one of their own" (Xing & Liu, 2016). The socio-cultural integration model is in no small measure a solution where the corporate brand model does not work. In the Macdonald's example, if the targeted customers have never eaten at a Macdonald's then corporate brand means nothing to them. However, local cuisines with value addition such as a Macdonald's sauce might entice customers and employees alike to identify with the firm. At face value, the socio-cultural integration model looks to give employees the best freedom to be themselves even at work.

Technical Models for Identity Development

Entrepreneurs in science-based fields are also conflicted nowadays in defining "who they are" and being that because technical and business considerations of a firm or industry are, in most cases, mutually exclusive (Karhunen, Olimpieva, & Hytti 2017). The co-founders of Apple, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs were very dissimilar: while Wozniak handled the technical components such as coding, Jobs dealt with the marketing and branding sections. In the end, Apple became synonymous with Jobs because he interacted with the customers, but technically, Wozniak was equally as important to Apple as Jobs was. Karhunen et al. (2017) note that maintaining the scientist and entrepreneur mindsets in one individual is a challenge that faces business leaders in science-based fields. Not every Wozniak has a Jobs to complement his or personality in business.

As with the example of academic librarians, Karhunen et al. (2017) took a narrative (autoethnographic) approach in conducting their study on identity work of 23 entrepreneurs- 12 Finnish and 11 Russian. Their findings were: the Russians first identified themselves as scientists before entrepreneurs while the Finns considered their personality to be precedent before either scientist or entrepreneur and in any way they felt the two roles were enjoined. As noted, narrative studies are inconsistent as they rely on subjective experience rather than objective data and statistical methods, hence in the study the differences in nationalistic identity between Finns and Russians played a massive role in their answers. The paradox of the research was the fact that it was in a scientific field yet they used the narrative approach which is normally applied in the humanities such as Psychology.

It is somewhat surprising that the findings of the study showed that even for scientist entrepreneurs psychology or somewhat personality determines who they are. The scientists self-define. However, the study does not delve into how much the environment and societal norms affect their answers. One glaring limitation of the study was the fact that they used translators because the interviews were in Finnish and Russian. Information could have been lost in such a manner. Besides that, the primary point to take away from the study was that personality and nationality influenced the ability of the science-based entrepreneurs to express themselves. The Russians' valued professionalism over personal nature though unlike the Finns who considered professionalism as part of personality. Hence, stereotypes and nationalistic traits contribute to the ability of entrepreneurs to be themselves in conduct, speech, business and so on.

The Impostor Syndrome

Besides a professional identity, there are various other ways people can view themselves at work. In some fields though, professionals may have a number of professional identities so much that they endanger themselves to some sort of identity crisis. For example, a professional with a bachelor's degree in Engineering and a Master's in Management might find himself or herself constantly feeling like an impostor in either field. Additionally, the two different areas of specialization might interfere with the other- a management decision might be compromised by an engineering approach.

Di Leo (2019) mentions that academic librarians often have episodes of imposter syndrome because they have degrees in various fields, and do research in multiple areas to the extent they lose their professional identity. Academic librarians predominantly use autoethnography as their primary quantitative research tool- which is subjective rather than objective. As autoethnography studies rely on self-reflection, it could be an indication that people who work in humanities, and whose line of work differ from what they pursued in college, are in more danger of being affected by the imposter syndrome.

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