TY - JOUR
T1 - The stories that make us
T2 - Leaders’ origin stories and temporal identity work
AU - Zheng, Wei
AU - Meister, Alyson
AU - Caza, Brianna Barker
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2021/8
Y1 - 2021/8
N2 - The stories we tell about our origins can shape how we think and act – helping us make sense of and communicate who we have “become” over time. To better understand the role that origin stories play in individuals’ work lives, we explore how 92 men and women leaders make sense of “becoming” a leader (origin stories) and “doing” leadership (enactment stories). We find that, despite the uniqueness of their experiences, their narratives converge around four frames, being, engaging, performing, and accepting, through which they understand, articulate, and enact their leader identities. We theorize that these narrative frames serve as sensemaking and identity work devices which allow them to create temporal coherence, validate their leader identity claims, and offer them behavioral scripts. Our findings also unearth key gender differences in the use of these frames, in that men used the performing frame more often and women tended toward the engaging frame. These findings provide novel insights into the ways in which the gendered context of leadership becomes embedded in leaders’ understandings of who they are and what they intend to do in their roles. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings on scholarly conversations around identity, leadership, and gender.
AB - The stories we tell about our origins can shape how we think and act – helping us make sense of and communicate who we have “become” over time. To better understand the role that origin stories play in individuals’ work lives, we explore how 92 men and women leaders make sense of “becoming” a leader (origin stories) and “doing” leadership (enactment stories). We find that, despite the uniqueness of their experiences, their narratives converge around four frames, being, engaging, performing, and accepting, through which they understand, articulate, and enact their leader identities. We theorize that these narrative frames serve as sensemaking and identity work devices which allow them to create temporal coherence, validate their leader identity claims, and offer them behavioral scripts. Our findings also unearth key gender differences in the use of these frames, in that men used the performing frame more often and women tended toward the engaging frame. These findings provide novel insights into the ways in which the gendered context of leadership becomes embedded in leaders’ understandings of who they are and what they intend to do in their roles. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings on scholarly conversations around identity, leadership, and gender.
KW - Gender
KW - identity
KW - identity work
KW - leader identity
KW - leadership
KW - leadership development
KW - narratives
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85081976702&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85081976702&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0018726720909864
DO - 10.1177/0018726720909864
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85081976702
SN - 0018-7267
VL - 74
SP - 1178
EP - 1210
JO - Human Relations
JF - Human Relations
IS - 8
ER -