What Happens When You Can't be Yourself at Work
AnonTechie writes:
No matter who you are, feeling threatened in your identity is bad for your well-being-and your career.
Like many other essentials of life, our sense of self is something we often take for granted, until it's under threat. When our circumstances appear at odds with who we feel ourselves to be, we are pitched headlong into a distressing state that scholars call "identity threat", which has been the subject of research from fields as disparate as marketing and political science.
But this extensive body of literature-until now-has lacked something truly fundamental: a rigorous way to measure identity threat that distinguishes it from related constructs such as self-esteem and identity suppression.
[...] At the same time, Vough stresses that no two individuals have exactly the same relationship to their identity. Conditions that might be threatening for one member of an identity grouping might be taken in stride by another. Moreover, not all identity groupings are equally well-understood in their responses to threat, owing to gaps in the research literature. Vough hopes her identity threat scale will help scholars fill in those gaps.
"There's a fair amount of research about gender-related threat, especially in the context of STEM, as well as race. But we need more knowledge about threats based on age, disability, etc. When we think of diversity, we think of race and gender, but diversity is so much more than that," Vough says.
[Source]: Costello College of Business at George Mason University
[Journal Ref.]: Journal of Applied Psychology
[Also Covered By]: PHYS.ORG
How would you deal with such situations ?
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.