Having a strong grasp on your personal identity is essential to ensuring you’ll find a workplace that’s a good fit and allows you to be the most authentic version of yourself, says Kathryn Ostermeier, Ph.D., an associate professor of Management at Bryant.
And college is the ideal time and place to develop, understand, and establish your identity before entering the workplace, according to Ostermeier, whose research focuses on individual behavior in the workplace.
“We're all multifaceted humans who have three levels of identity,” says Ostermeier. “We have individual identities: our values, our personality. Then we have these relational things. For instance, I'm a mother, I'm a wife, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister. I'm a teacher to my students. I'm also a faculty member here at Bryant. Then at the more macro level, we have these collective identities: there’s gender, religious affiliation, racial and ethnic affiliation, political leanings, as well as organizational identification. So, there are a lot of nuances in identity.”
Getting all those identities to mesh neatly with a job and employer can be a big challenge, but Ostermeier, who recently co-authored a study on the the consequences of inauthenticity in the journal Academy of Management Annals, says a strong sense of identity is a crucial component of personal well-being, job satisfaction, and productivity.
“Prior generations maybe didn't care as much, but younger generations, Gen Z even more than millennials, really prioritize living their truth and being their authentic self,” she says. “I always tell students that as a new employee, you’re not going to change the culture. Either you adapt or you leave. The third path is you persist, but you're a misfit; you’re not going to get the same opportunities for promotion and advancement, you’re going to be disgruntled, and you’re probably going to leave anyway.”
Ostermeier views identity as less about personality than values. In the Management leadership seminar and in workshops with employees, she offers participants a list of 100 values and asks them to pick their top three and rank them.
“Knowing your ranking helps you live out your values,” she says. “If you're living out those values consistently, you will be perceived as authentic because authenticity is really about consistency across different domains.”
College gives students an opportunity to try on different identities in a safe space, see how those ‘selves’ are perceived by others, and find a strategic fit that feels authentic, says Ostermeier, who classes include a workshop on cultivating authentic leadership and a structured debate about the value of authentic leadership. Ideally, that identity will not only be authentic and meaningful, but beneficial.
“If you're living out [your] values consistently, you will be perceived as authentic because authenticity is really about consistency across different domains.”
People who enter the workforce with a good understanding of their values will be better equipped for the task of determining whether they align with those of prospective employers.
"A company can espouse certain things like caring about the environment and write a beautiful corporate social responsibility report but pollute the river at the same time,” Ostermeier says. “Try your best as an outsider to pick up the culture and suss out their enacted values. If you care about transparency, for example, look for a company that’s open with their pay structure.”
For younger workers, having to adhere to a workplace dress code is often viewed as inauthentic.
“I would never let students pick casual dress as a core value,” says Ostermeier. “Maybe it looks like freedom to dress however they want. That's different than the dress code itself being an issue. It's probably that the culture in general has very strict rules, and maybe you’d be better off in a more organic organization that doesn't really care how you dress and focuses more on how you perform.”
Focusing on values can also help overcome potential conflicts around collective identity, such as gender, race, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, or political affiliation.
“If your focus on authenticity centers on being a Republican or being a Democrat, for example, you may feel like you're not able to be yourself in the workplace,” Ostermeier says.
“Collective identities oftentimes separate us, but if we focus on values, we tend to have a lot more in common."
“Collective identities oftentimes separate us, but if we focus on values, we tend to have a lot more in common,” she explains. “We can be very different people, but we can still value family. Those commonalities make connections that can be a resource we can use when we have issues around inclusion. For instance, if we have good rapport, relationships, and psychological safety, it's much easier to have frank, honest conversations than if we don't know each other.”
Companies don't spend enough time during the recruiting and interviewing process assessing values; “It's very much a focus on skills,” says Ostermeier. But a good values match also benefits employers.
Some shared values, like hard work and stewardship, have obvious attractions for employers. From a value-extraction point of view, companies want you to work your hardest and do your best to take care of the resources entrusted to you, says Ostermeier, whose research links having a psychological authenticity climate in the workplace to better job satisfaction, employee retention, and more willingness to "go the extra mile" on behalf of the company and coworkers.
More generally, “Our feelings of authenticity drive our well-being at work and our engagement,” she says. “It's critical from a bottom-line perspective for companies to help employees feel authentic, because those who do will probably perform better at work.”
"Our feelings of authenticity drive our well-being at work and our engagement."
Ostermeier advises students trying to walk the line between authenticity and fitting in at work to seek out mentors and champions.
“A mentor is someone who gives you advice and is ahead of you in the company in terms of organizational tenure or role level; a champion is someone who advocates for you and someone who has institutional power, who sees themself in you, perhaps because you have the same values; you have something in common. They probably have different resources and connections than your mentor, and that can be the leverage you need to get to where you want to go,” she says.
Having workplace allies “is important for everyone, but I'd say it's more critical if you feel like the identity or values you have are a little less normative in the organization, because you need a champion more than someone who fits the common idea of what a leader looks like,” Ostermeier says.
