Your ‘work identity’ is key to improving your wellbeing
Research has found that a person’s ‘work identity’ — how important a person’s job is to their sense of who they are — can be linked to their overall wellbeing and that people who have a strong work identity work longer hours without it affecting their wellbeing.
It might be tempting to conclude that having a job you love is the answer to the problem of long working hours. But this is not necessarily true — for instance even though women with stronger work identity choose to work longer hours and evaluate their job satisfaction positively, working longer hours increases their job related anxiety and depression and may affect their overall health.
Mark Bryan (University of Sheffield) and Alita Nandi (University of Essex) have looked into this issue as although there is an assumption that longer working hours means lower wellbeing, this is not always the case. It is known that some workers want more paid hours and that it is the difference between the hours someone wants and actually has, that can cause lower wellbeing — someone’s work identity may explain why this is.
The research findings, based on Understanding Society, the largest UK household longitudinal survey, confirm that a person’s sense of identity plays a key role in determining their wellbeing, both directly and via the type of job they do.
For a given level of hours, having a stronger work identity is associated with higher wellbeing. If you choose a job you identity with, it can lead to higher self-esteem and greater wellbeing.
Working long hours is associated with lower wellbeing and working part-time is associated with higher wellbeing, but people tend to select jobs with work hours that match their identities. Someone with a weak work identity will avoid a long-hours job that would be harmful to their wellbeing.
Work identity can reduce the adverse effects of working long hours. For example, women working long hours who have a strong work identity report less job-related anxiety and higher job satisfaction than similar women working long hours who have a weak work identity, and for men there is a similar effect on their life satisfaction.
The sizes of the effects are often substantial when compared to your health effecting your wellbeing. For instance, long hours are associated with about the same increase in job-related anxiety as being in good health, part-time work among women is associated with an increase in job satisfaction that is half the health effect, and the difference in job satisfaction between the two ends of the identity scale is nearly four times the health effect.
Further details can be found at:
If you’re interested in contacting the authors of this research then please contact them using econ@sheffield.ac.uk or +44 114 222 5151
