American Professionalism: Contents and Consequences of an Organizational Role Schema

Research in impression management, sociology, and cultural psychology suggests that socio-historical and cultural conditions have shaped people’s “professional” role schema in the contemporary United States. Building on these literatures, we examined evidence that contemporary professional role schemas reflect historical trends of minimizing personal references at work. In Study 1, working managers reconstructed the office of a target presumed to have (or not have) a professional reputation. Results show when participants’ professional role schemas are invoked, participants assembled the office with significantly fewer objects symbolic of personal life but with similar numbers of work-related and neutral objects. Moreover, this effect was moderated by participant’s tenure in the U.S., suggesting this standard of professionalism may be culturally specific. A second study showed that a job candidate’s success was significantly lowered by the mere suggestion that they would make minor references to personal topics in a hypothetical client meeting. Implications for the implicit cultural standards that guide identity work in organizations are discussed.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39162/4/908.pd