Hitting Rock Bottom After Job Loss: Bouncing Back to Create a New Positive Work Identity

By Dean A. Shepherd, T. Williams. 2016

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although people often value work identities, events sometimes threaten these identities, creating situations where individuals struggle to overcome the identity threat. Building on the theories of identity and escape from self, we develop a “rock bottom” model of generating a new positive work identity. Specifically, individuals who eventually hit rock bottom come to realize that the identity has been lost, which can lead to a path to recovery or to a path to dysfunction. The path to recovery involves escape through identity play and the oscillation between disciplined identity play and identity refinement/validation. The path to dysfunction involves escape though cognitive deconstruction. Regulatory focus is important in distinguishing between those who engage in identity play to generate possible new positive identities (i.e., promotion focus) and those who engage in cognitive dysfunction (i.e., prevention focus). A deeper understanding of why some recover and others languish provides an opportunity to ...

Subfields: Demography, General Health Professions, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/976ee584f7f44fef9eb389b48469bd8198ea9471

How researchers see this paper

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In Demography

  1. Dean A. Shepherd
  2. T. Williams

In General Health Professions

  1. T. Williams
  2. Dean A. Shepherd

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

  1. T. Williams
  2. Dean A. Shepherd
  3. Holger Patzelt
  4. Johan Wiklund
  5. James C. Hayton
  6. Melissa S. Cardon
  7. G. Cacciotti
  8. A. McKelvie

Citations in the corpus