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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1382271
Employees' experiences of personal and collective work-identity in the context of an organizational change
Provisionally accepted- 1 University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden
- 2 Department of Occupational Health Science and Psychology, Faculty of Health and Occupational Studies, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden
In the present study we investigated employees' experiences of personal and collective workidentity in the context of an organizational change. Data consisted of semi-structured interviews with employees that will be affected by the change. We conducted a theory-driven thematic analysis based on four predetermined main themes: personal and collective emotional, and cognitive work-identity. Respondents experienced distinct and unambiguous proudness, bonding, familiarity and missing in their personal emotional work-identity, and quite distinct and unambiguous coherence, reflection, mental time travel, but ambivalent, or even lack of, correspondence in their personal cognitive work-identity. They experienced a mix of distinct and ambiguous organizational proudness, esteem and affective commitment in their collective emotional work-identity. They experienced distinct and unambiguous identification with the organization, but ambivalent assimilation and incorporation of the organization in their collective cognitive work-identity. Such a complexity in the employees' work-identity experiences also indicates complexity in their organizational change reactions.
Keywords: personal and collective work-identity, emotion, Cognition, Organizational Change, theory-driven thematic analysis 3
Received: 08 Feb 2024; Accepted: 24 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Nordhall, Hörvallius, Nedelius and Knez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ola Nordhall, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden
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