Letting Go and Moving On: Work-Related Identity Loss and Recovery

Entrepreneurial Cognition

“…By sharing a new identity with others, the individual not only gets feedback, but those others can also aid in coproducing a more conceivable version of the identity by supporting particular features, adding new information, and facilitating the establishment of middle ground (Boje 1991;Conroy and O'Leary-Kelly 2014;Ibarra and Barbulescu 2010;Polletta and Lee 2006). Role models are a particularly important source of social validation for an alternative work identity Ibarra 1999;Pratt et al 2006).…”

“…However, an "involuntary career transition, sparked by an unexpected job loss, may not provide sufficient psychological safety to allow for identity play" (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010: 20). More specifically, individuals who experience work-related losses (e.g., failed entrepreneurs; Shepherd 2003) frequently feel grief-the negative emotional reaction in response to losing something important-and then go through a time of liminality ) during which they "struggle to establish a 'new normal' around the changed sense of self" (Conroy and O'Leary-Kelly 2014). Such loss often threatens individuals' sense of self because they generally feel a disconnect between their current and future work identities and then have to "take stock, re-evaluate, revise, re-see, and re-judge" their work identity (Strauss 1997: 102).…”

Entrepreneurial Identity

“…By sharing a new identity with others, the individual not only gets feedback, but those others can also aid in coproducing a more conceivable version of the identity by supporting particular features, adding new information, and facilitating the establishment of middle ground (Boje 1991;Conroy and O'Leary-Kelly 2014;Ibarra and Barbulescu 2010;Polletta and Lee 2006). Role models are a particularly important source of social validation for an alternative work identity (Ashforth 2001;Ibarra 1999;Pratt et al 2006).…”

“…However, an "involuntary career transition, sparked by an unexpected job loss, may not provide sufficient psychological safety to allow for identity play" (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010: 20). More specifically, individuals who experience work-related losses (e.g., failed entrepreneurs; Shepherd 2003) frequently feel grief-the negative emotional reaction in response to losing something important-and then go through a time of liminality (Ashforth 2001) during which they "struggle to establish a 'new normal' around the changed sense of self" (Conroy and O'Leary-Kelly 2014). Such loss often threatens individuals' sense of self because they generally feel a disconnect between their current and future work identities and then have to "take stock, re-evaluate, revise, re-see, and re-judge" their work identity (Strauss 1997: 102).…”

Continuing Down the Road to Reintegration: Status and Ongoing Support of the U.S. Air Force's Wounded Warriors

“…McKee-Ryan et al, 2005, analytically summarizes this literature; the authors found that mental health during unemployment was positively and significantly related to other variables, including social support and financial resources, and negatively and significantly related to perceived centrality of work to life and the length of unemployment. Generally speaking, the process of career transition (which can be loss of work, or unemployment, but can also include transition from one job or career to another) is one that necessitates renegotiation of one's self-identity and is hypothesized to include construction of self-narratives of loss, grief, and recovery in the work domain (Conroy and O'Leary-Kelly, 2014).…”