Updating the Image of the Ideal Worker

IN MANY ORGANIZATIONS TODAY, employees are expected to be wholly devoted to their work, such that they attend to their jobs ahead of all else, including family, personal needs — and even their health. These expectations are personified by the image of the ‘ideal worker’, which defines the most desirable workers as those who are totally committed to and always available for their work. Embracing this image is richly rewarded — particularly in professional and managerial jobs.

Scholars have long focused on the difficulties that women experience with these expectations, but my research suggests that men also find these expectations challenging. People of both genders are facing a conflict between employer expectations and the type of worker that they prefer to be.

I recently set out to examine how people working at a demanding professional services firm navigate tensions between organizational expectations that they be ‘ideal workers’ — which I call the expected professional identity — and the type of workers they prefer to be — their experienced professional identity.

Identity Management: ‘Passing’ and ‘Revealing’

For some time, the image of the ideal worker and its attendant expectation of ‘complete devotion to work’ has been believed to be a key driver of workplace gender inequality. Scholars have mostly examined how women — and mothers in particular — navigate expectations that they devote themselves to work.

Less attention has been paid to men’s experiences in this regard, echoing more general tendencies to frame work–family conflict as a ‘woman’s problem’. Yet as a core element of an expected professional identity, this image shapes workers’ experiences. To develop a theory about the ways that people manage incongruence between and professional identities, I turned to sociologist ’s concepts of ‘passing’ and ‘revealing’.

He settled for six weeks of unpaid leave and worked 80-hour weeks, travelling weekly, for the rest of the year. Yet he found that “people still talked like I was out three months.” At his annual review, he was told that AGM could not properly evaluate him because the six weeks he had taken off meant he “had this big donut hole in [his] year.” That year, his performance rating fell from a 3 to a 2, and he did not receive a hoped-for promotion. Thus, Michael’s ‘deviance’ was both recognized and penalized. In a subsequent conversation, he reflected, “No one ever questioned my commitment until I had a family.”