Abstract:
Management and organization studies indicate that motherhood can change
women’s working lives and that the transition to motherhood contributes to the
leaky pipeline for female talent. The extant literature suggests that women
manage tensions between cultural norms for ‘good mothers’ and ‘ideal workers’
by developing a consistent approach, such as prioritising their maternal identities
over their worker identities or trying to segment the two identities to limit conflict.
However, the suggestion that women can manage tensions between their
maternal and worker identities utilising one strategy implies stability in these
identities that is not evident in the everyday practices of working mothers.
Drawing on a qualitative study of German women’s experiences of returning to
professional and managerial roles within a manufacturing company following
parental leave, I describe the identity work returners engage in to sustain their
maternal and worker identities in the face of competing norms for mothers and
workers. The findings indicate that returners engage in dialectic identity work,
which is the purposeful and situationally-emergent effort returners expend to
construct coexisting maternal and worker identities. This study extends previous
research by highlighting the instability and incoherence in maternal and worker
identities following the return to work -- differentiating between the strategies
returners describe using in response to identity challenges upon workplace re-
entry and the dialectic identity work tactics that facilitate situationally-appropriate
identity responses. Applying Kreiner et al.’s (2015) identity elasticity construct to
individual identities, this study demonstrates how returners maintain maternal
and worker identities that are shifting and incoherent. This study also extends
our understanding of women’s experiences in returning to work by revealing the
influence of the length of parental leave taken and prior return to work experience
on returners’ identity work.