ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a range of theoretical approaches to consider how identities shape, and are shaped by, the health and social care workplace. Organisational sociologists have long been interested in the ways in which workplace identities are formed. The chapter describes a psychoanalytically informed approach to understanding workplace identities and the implications for leaders and managers. The threats to individual, collective and workplace identities are elaborated by the sociologist Richard Sennett. He warns that people can no longer make sense of who they are through their work and, consequently, are denied opportunities to form meaningful work-based and positive self-identities. The chapter discusses that such emotional intelligence is an important attribute of transformational leadership, and one which can be facilitated by an authentic leadership model. It explores theoretical approaches which seek to understand contemporary workplace identity as being less fixed, more fluid and fragile.
