ABSTRACT
A woman, a mother, a manager, a team member—individuals often have several identities, both in and outside of the workplace, that are important to them (James, 1890; Roccas & Brewer, 2002; Rosenberg, 1997). Typically, one assumes that although individuals have many identities, identities are often triggered or activated one at a time in relevant domains. For example, one’s work identity may be activated while at work, and one’s parent identity may be activated at home. However, research also suggests that identities often spill over (Rothbard, 2001; Rothbard & Edwards, 2003) or are intermingled (Ashforth, Kreiner, & Fugate, 2000) across domains. Thus, getting a telephone call about a child while at work might trigger an employee’s family identity while his or her work identity is already activated. Given the existence of multiple identities, it is important to understand how coactivation, the activation of more than one identity at a time, occurs and is managed by individuals, particularly because the ensuing relationship between identities may be positive or negative. Having positive relationships between coactivated identities is important because it can lead to beneficial outcomes for individuals such as enrichment through the generation of positive emotion (Rothbard, 2001), greater integrative complexity and problem-solving ability (Ramarajan, 2008), and greater effectiveness and resilience (Caza & Wilson, Chapter 5, this volume) or innovation (Cheng, Sanchez-Burks, & Lee, 2008). Thus, our focal question is, “under what conditions do individuals experience simultaneously activated identities positively?”
