What does having power mean, not for, but to an individual at work? In this article, we focus on the individual’s concerns and experiences in the work setting and discuss how individuals conceptualise and construct their own power at work. This perspective is important due to its corresponding implications for how individuals choose their jobs, how they show proactive work behaviours and how they are engaged in power relations in organisations. In-depth interviews with 11 participants were subjected to interpretative phenomenological analysis and key themes were identified to explain how these individuals cognitively, socially and operationally crafted their ‘own’ versions of power in their organisations. Despite the idiosyncratic similarity among the participants, our analysis revealed a clear divide: ‘position-based power holders’ and ‘territory holders’. We first present our findings and results with interview excerpts and implications drawn from the emergent themes based on participant accounts. Next, we focus on two individual cases to explain how these individuals identified themselves as power holders within their own organisational contexts. Finally, we discuss our findings in association with other theoretical frameworks and concepts including the meaning of power, the organisational context and proactive work behaviours.

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The information technology (IT) industry is becoming more widely renowned for its professionals seeking global career opportunities. These individuals independently build careers abroad, often receiving limited economic benefits while facing socially conditioned perceptions from their employers, peers, managers and clients. However, there is little research on how they perceive their personal and social worlds, and use their knowledge, skills and other personal resources to shape their careers in these circumstances. This study explores the meaning of being a foreign professional as understood by the IT professionals themselves by reflecting on their expectations, emotions and interactions with others. In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 non-national professionals working in domestic IT companies in Germany. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis to gain insight through their individual perspectives into their agentic work behaviours and the injustices they perceived. We identified three major themes that explained how participants interpreted their roles in their organisations (reinterpretation), resituated themselves in their interactions with clients (recontextualisation) and changed the way they made sense of their status in their current circumstances (reframing). The experiential themes were discussed in light of literature, while individual nuances led us to identify unexplored features of the studied phenomenon.