sociality and identity at work - a 2x2

I came across this article, TED Ideas, Why a company is not a family — and how companies can bond with their employees instead

https://ideas.ted.com/why-a-company-is-not-a-family-and-how-companies-can-bond-with-their-employees-instead/?utm_source=recommendation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=explore&utm_term=ideas-blog-1

and it gave me some pause.

I have some tangential observations about work identity and sociality based on this article. I think we all want different things from work, and I think we all want different things from our workplace. Some people have a transactional relationship with their work - work is a way to pay the bills and to enable these people to do the things they really care about - which might be family or hobbies or church or whatever. For some people their work is integral to their identity - I know this is true for many physicians for example - their work defines who they are. I’ve interviewed close to 40 physicians for a leadership study I was working on and I would say 90% of them would tell you that being a physician is central to their identity. That’s not a statistically significant sample, but it’s pretty telling.

Separate from whether work is integrated into one’s identity is also the question of how one relates to the people one works with. Do you seek friendship and sociality with the people you work with? Or is socializing a distraction from your work and a time waster? I’ve read many articles by people who have loved the work-from-home experience forced on most organizations as a result of the pandemic because it allowed them to avoid what they perceived as the wasted time of workplace socialization. Other people who value workplace-based sociality feel disconnected. Sociality has two functions in the workplace in my opinion: first, it provides a lubricant for productivity; and second it provides an intrinsic reward for being part of a group. I definitely lean toward high-sociality in the workplace, so I have a bias in that direction. I see making social connections in the workplace rewarding in and of themselves - this is where I make most of my social contacts, I have relatively few other social contacts than work - so it’s either at work that I make social contacts or none at all. So there is that. But when you regard the people you work with as something more than just instrumental toward getting work done, getting work done is easier. Sociality creates trust bonds and ease of communication. But those relationships require time and maintenance, which for some people is a burden. 

This is a 2x2 that I whipped up - it could definitely use some additional clever category names, especially for low/low and high/high. But I think you get the idea. 

Sociality/Identity	Low identity	High Identity
Low sociality	Work as purely transactional, means to an end	The lone genius
High sociality	The social butterfly	Work as primary source of personal meaning

With regard to the specific idea of the article - work as family - this is not necessarily implied even in the high/high box. 

Work is a voluntary relationship, unlike family. Work relationships all end. Some may last a very long time and may play important or not important parts of your life. You may identify with your profession and organization a lot or a little. But at some point everyone leaves the organization. It is normal and healthy and it should be treated as such. I like that the article suggests that departures from work organizations should be celebrated, assuming they are for the right reasons. It is not healthy to think of your relationship with your work organization as family. Work organizations do not have the same claims over an individual, regardless of whether you like or even love the people you work with. Work-based friendships can blur the lines at times, and that I think is actually a good thing, but there one needs to maintain that there is a hard stop where the organization cannot go beyond.