Third-World "Sloggers" or Elite Global Professionals? Using Organizational Toolkits to Redefine Work Identity in Information Technology Offshore Outsourcing
Third-World "Sloggers" or Elite Global Professionals? Using Organizational Toolkits to Redefine Work Identity in Information Technology Offshore Outsourcing
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第三世界的“慢跑者”还是全球精英专业人士？
DOI：
10.1287/orsc.2016.1068
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发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Amar Gupta
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Sharon Koppman;E. Mattarelli;Amar Gupta
组织越来越依赖跨越国家和组织边界的团队，但新兴国家和供应商公司的团队成员并没有被西方同行和基于客户的同行视为专业同行。为了了解他们如何应对这种身份威胁，我们整合了两种可能的答案：基于自上而下身份调节的批判性文献的组织反应和基于自下而上身份建构的积极文献的个人反应。基于三家印度信息技术(IT)离岸外包公司的深度访谈和档案数据，我们研究了组织和个人身份识别过程如何协同应对这一威胁。我们发现，企业并没有像他们声称的那样，通过直接监管员工身份来解决这一威胁，而是为员工提供了一套组织工具包--一套组织上可用的文化资源(例如，框架和故事)和政治资源(例如，政策和程序)，员工有选择地和有策略地使用这些资源来构建积极的身份认同。通过将工具包视角引入身份识别过程，我们对跨层次身份识别联系、身份识别过程的战略性质以及全球身份识别的本地背景的理论和研究做出了贡献。
Organizations increasingly rely on teams that span national and organizational boundaries, yet team members in emerging countries and vendor firms are not treated as professional peers by their Western and client-based peers. To understand how they respond to this identity threat, we integrate two literatures that suggest two possible answers: an organizational response, based on the critical literature on top-down identity regulation, and an individual response, based on the positive literature on bottom-up identity construction. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival data from three Indian information technology (IT) offshore outsourcing firms, we examine how organizational and individual identity processes work in tandem to address this threat. We find that firms do not resolve this threat by regulating employee identity directly as they claim, but instead provide workers with an organizational toolkit —a set of organizationally available cultural resources (e.g., frames and stories) and political resources (e.g., policies and procedures) that workers use selectively and strategically to construct positive identities. By bringing a toolkit perspective to identity processes, we contribute to theory and research on cross-level identity linkages, the strategic nature of identity processes, and the local context of global identity.