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Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior

Volume 12, 2025

Positive Identity Construction in Diverse Organizations

  • Laura Morgan Roberts1 and Brianna Barker Caza2
  • 1Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA; email: [email protected] 2Bryan School of Management, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
  • Vol. 12:423-451 (Volume publication date January 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on October 01, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Our desire to cultivate and sustain positive identities has a powerful influence on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dynamics. While sometimes the quest for positive identities promotes celebration of diversity and uniqueness, in many other circumstances our inherent motivation to strive toward building more positive identities can have unintended consequences for DEI in organizations. In this review, we organize research on positive identities at work to better understand the experiences of the diverse set of individuals that compose our work organizations today. We invite a critical examination of how individuals with underrepresented and dominant identities deal with identity demands in diverse workplaces in both helpful and harmful ways. We conclude with directions for future research on interventions that mitigate identity threat and promote inclusion.

Keyword(s): affirmation, diversity, identities at work, identity threat, inclusion, positive identities
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2025-01-21
2025-06-14
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Positive Identity Construction in Diverse Organizations
Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 12, 423 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-110721-041934
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-110721-041934
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