Presentation Session #5: Organizations, Work & Identity

When: Friday, March 13, 2026 — 11:15–12:15
Room: C.521 — Helsinki

Presentations

1. Xian Zhu

Title: Playing the Jigsaw Time Games: Enacting Temporal Knowing in Interprofessional Coordination

Summary: This study aims to advance research on knowing and professional expertise, which has predominantly emphasized know-how and distinction-drawing, by foregrounding knowing-when as a critical yet understudied dimension of knowing practices. I conceptualize knowing-when as actors’ tacit understanding of organizational rhythms, colleagues’ temporal habits, appropriate action timing, an important dimension that also enables the enactment of domain expertise. Based on a 16-month ethnographic field study in a Level-1 trauma center and its emergency department (ED) in Canada, I identify three interdependent practices through which professionals enact knowing-when, including mobilizing awareness of temporal context, anticipatory knowing, and temporal gaming. Through these practices, professionals not only meet situational demands of their own work, but also align their own actions with other workers’ expectations and organizational temporal rhythms, therefore sustaining coordination of interdependent work. On the other hand, while these “time games” may expand professionals’ discretion to secure critical resources and more time, they can simultaneously strain inter-unit relationships and complicate temporal coordination patterns. In sum, this paper highlights knowing-when as a critical resourcing mechanism, enabling professionals to “do more with less” particularly in a resource-constrained environment.

2. Alana Pierce

Title: Let Me Give You Some Advice: How mentors in entrepreneurship accelerators help reduce subjective uncertainty

Summary: Uncertainty presents a challenge to early-stage entrepreneurship because it can hinder entrepreneurial decision-making and action in opportunity enactment. Receiving advice from knowledgeable others, such as mentors, is a key way entrepreneurs seek to reduce uncertainty and overcome barriers to decision-making and action. However, the mechanisms within entrepreneurial advice remain unexplained, and scholars have yet to discover how mentoring in these settings helps founders reduce uncertainty. To explore this process, I conducted a two-year ethnography in an entrepreneurship accelerator, and find that mentors often invoke expectations by investors for founder behavior and performance. Using a discursive approach, I zoom in on 283 moments within mentor-founder discussions in which mentors invoke investors’ expectations. Within these moments I found that mentors adopted a series of what I call discursive moves: exemplifying, evaluating, consequentializing, asserting, and directing. Embedded in the discursive moves are evaluative criteria and distinctive mechanisms and I theorize that they collectively function as a disciplining power, which, in turn, recalibrates founders’ expectations and steers behavior. In effect, discursive moves encourage founders to align their choices with investor expectations, thereby maintaining a normative order that reduces subjective uncertainty for both founders and investors.

3. Samira Sariraei

Title: Supervisor–Employee Identity Negotiations: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective

Summary: We integrate Identity Negotiation Theory and Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to examine how supervisor–employee identity processes influence work outcomes. We propose a novel 2×2 typology of supervisor–employee identity negotiation styles based on each party’s self-esteem orientation. Across the four dyads – Fast Growth (both have secure, noncontingent self-esteem), Supervisor-Pending Growth (insecure supervisor, secure employee), Employee-Pending Growth (secure supervisor, insecure employee), and Halt (both insecure) – we identify distinct identity negotiation dynamics and outcomes. We show how noncontingent (secure) versus contingent (insecure) self-esteem drives motivations for congruence or conflict, drawing on SDT’s concepts of autonomous versus controlled regulation. Each quadrant is defined and illustrated with examples in terms of identity affirmation, motivation, and expected performance and well-being. We discuss how this framework extends the identity, leadership, and SDT literatures by highlighting the interpersonal negotiation of identity under varying conditions of need satisfaction. Finally, we outline practical implications for supervisors and HR (e.g., fostering autonomy-supportive leadership) and suggest future research to test and refine the typology.