Who are you at work? Organizations and professions want to control who you want to be to ensure your compliance with corporate and professional goals. Both desired and feared identities play a role in regulating elite professionals’ occupational identities. Our paper, published in the Journal of Management Studies, demonstrates how workers are enticed and coerced to construct negatively valenced feared identities (i.e., those with negative meanings associated with the self as flawed or failing) in relation to those they deem desirable (i.e., those with positive meanings associated with the self as successful and competent). Identity regulation is enacted through people’s construction of these desired and feared identities which, through processes of self-assessment and autocorrection, enforce conformity.  

Our study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of occupational members and explains how desired and feared identities operate jointly to regulate employees’ selves. 

Regulating Occupational Identities 

We investigated the identity work of UK-based veterinarians in a single case study organization with an industry reputation for ‘excellence’. Our study shows how disciplinary power is exercised through individualized processes of self-construction in which vets desired identities as dedicated fixers and savers of animals were menaced by feared identities as professionally inept animal harmers, endangerers, and killers. Desired and feared identities function in combination as antagonistic foils to enforce normative control through positive and negative identity regulation.   

Positive identity regulation 

Positive identity regulation operates through the authorship of desired identity narratives – positively phrased narratives combining accounts of success and favourable self-evaluations – that are highly appealing, if often somewhat idealized constructions that quieten feelings of insecurity and vulnerability. In processes of positive identity regulation, self-assessment and correction operate through pride. Prideful talk takes two forms: self-idealization and public acclaim. Self-idealization disciplines by encouraging perseverance to maintain and further enhance desired identities, for example, by developing technical skills and increasing specialist knowledge. Public acclaim disciplines occupational members by encouraging continuing efforts to be regarded as credible, high performing, and worthy by peers, employers, clients, and other valued audiences.  

Negative identity regulation 

Negative identity regulation operates by means of feared identity narratives – i.e. negatively valenced self-narratives featuring errors, failures, transgressions, and other critical self-talk. Feared identities discipline primarily through guilt. Talk about felt guilt motivates self-corrective behavior by eliciting discomfort and takes two principal forms: empathic distress and public denigration. In talk about empathic distress occupational members cast themselves either in general terms as lacking required knowledge, skills, or other capabilities that they ought properly to possess, or in regard to specific incidents where they have been personally responsible for failures, errors, suffering, or harm. Professionals’ talk about the guilt they experience in relation to instances in which they are errant are mnemonic reminders by which they self-police to guard against complacency and which encourage them to focus on being error-free in their practices. Public denigration disciplines by raising the uncomfortable spectre of significant others’ disapproval. Guilt caused by actual or prospective censure leads occupational members to work on their selves to gain others’ trust and esteem. For example, by engaging in personal research, practicing difficult techniques, and enrolling on training courses in their personal quests to be ‘better’ professionals in ways which produce them as compliant, practitioners. 

Significance  

Our study invites scholars to focus jointly on desired and feared identities which operate in tandem to regulate workers identities in ways that are normalized and largely unquestioned.  

Recognizing how feared and desired versions of occupational selves function as ‘foils’ to each other offers a more comprehensive understanding of the tensional nature of work selves. For every perfect, well-regarded desired self (for example, a vet that consistently saves animals and is held in high esteem by colleagues and clients), there is a contrary defective, poorly regarded feared counterpart (for example, an incompetent vet that harms or kills animals and is denigrated by colleagues and clients). 

We show that, in elite occupations, conformist identity work often results in muted resistance with self-doubt prompting individuals to cling ever more tightly to the security of desired identities as means to alleviate fear. 

Takeaways 

For scholars 

Our study encourages consideration of the importance of the dark side of occupational selves and the role of desired and feared identities in regulatory practices. It has relevance to a broad range of professional groups, such as academics, management consultants, and accountants, whose expert authority is increasingly under scrutiny and sometimes contested. In particular, it explains why in professional groups strongly wedded to identity ideals resistance to normative control is often lowkey.  

For employers and professional bodies 

Practically speaking, a greater understanding of desired and feared identities can be used by employers to help better support those facing work-related challenges. It is a wake-up call to organizations and professions to put in place means to assist individuals in their efforts to respond to threats to positively valenced identities. It is in employers and professional bodies interest that workers find sufficient existential security to maintain a felicitous balance between desired and feared identities so that they can continue productively and happily in their work.  

For workers 

It may help workers to realize that a substantial degree of normative conformity is often the price they must pay to realize their desired identities and the aesthetic values and stylistic accoutrements associated with being a member of an elite occupation. For those who are struggling with an undue focus on feared identities it is an invitation to recognize how they are being coerced, to manage guilt effectively, and (re)discover meaning in their work.