WK 3 Com

Week Three Lecture: Identity and Difference

Completion requirements

A short story about identity

Cynt Marshall is a Christian and the current Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Dallas Mavericks.  She is also a mother, a wife, and a social justice activist.  A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in Business Administration and Human Resources, Cynt has had a trailblazing career spanning 36 years, mostly in senior management positions at AT&T.  In 2018, she was sought out by Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who asked her to lead his basketball organization.  Since leading the Dallas Mavericks, she has led in turning around the organization from a soiled reputation of misogyny to one organization which receives accolades and awards for its efforts towards inclusivity.  Yet in her own personal professional journey, Cynt had to deal with negotiating her own identity in a company where she was an outsider on several fronts.

Years ago, earlier in her management career, one of Cynt’s earliest supervisors felt uncomfortable with her Christian beliefs, telling her for example not to use words such as blessed and to use words such as lucky instead, when referring to her circumstances, as this sounded more professional.  She usually resisted this, pointing out that she did feel blessed, and not lucky.    The supervisor also asked her to be less jovial and quieter, as being loud or too jovial at work were traits not associated with professionalism.  Later, when Cynt was promoted to another senior management position, her supervisor asked her to change her name from Cynt to Cynthia or Cyndi, arguing that either of the names sounded more professional than Cynt, and that no one had ever heard of an executive called Cynt.  It was at that point that Cynt offered to remove her name from the shortlist for the executive position.  However, she was also worried of the potential that her refusal to comply would result in her being fired from her current position.  To her surprise, the company CEO at AT&T telephoned her, and not only did he call her Cynt, but he also said that he knew about the Bible verses displayed in her office.  In other words, he was telling her that he knew that she was not a typical fit for the executive position, and he was ok with her identity.

Why is identity so important to us and how does that influence our participation in the organization?

Our identity involves our age, culture, religion, political views, race, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, educational level, sometimes even hobbies, and these collectively form our self-concepts, our self-esteem as well as how we sometimes are able to interact with others.  Identity in the workplace is so important that it can affect our level of performance on the job.  In some organizations older workers find themselves no longer a fit with an organization perhaps that they would have worked for, for several years, because, perhaps the organization is youth-oriented or only welcomes employees if they are below a certain age.  This week's HBR assignment explores that too.

If you see yourself as one of the individuals whose identity is not common in the organization, how then can you communicate this identity in ways that help you to contribute meaningfully to the organization?  In Cynt’s case, although her identity was marginal in the organization, the AT&T CEO’s call in a way gave her the permission that she needed, to feel comfortable with her unique identity in the organization. Cynt Marshall’s experience earlier in her career encapsulates the argument regarding the tension between the organization’s desire to control employees’ identity on one side, and the employee’s response through a process called “identity work”, (Eisenberg et al, 2017, p.201).  Ultimately, employees negotiate with themselves and the organization through a sense - making process until they ultimately develop into one of the seven identities of a Self-doubt, Struggler, Surfer, Storyteller, Strategist, Stencil, or Soldier.  Some employees also straddle several of these identities.  Whichever identity an employee ultimately develops into, communication plays an integral role through which the employee responds to this organizational control, engaging in dialogue, and balancing the constraints of any given situation with any potential for creativity.  Pages 222- 223 of our textbook give a very detailed account of the role of communication in all this.  In Cynt’s case, from the day she had her conversation with the AT&T CEO, she was able to manage the organization’s desire to control her identity, with her own self-concept and both the organization and her flourished from this effort.

 

References

Eisenberg, EM., Trethewey, A., LeGreco, M., & Goodall, HL, Jr. (2017).  Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint. Bedford /St. Martins