Lone star or team player?:The interrelationship of different identification foci and the role of self-presentation concerns

Work identity is important in the attraction and retention of staff, yet how the facets of such identity relate remains convoluted and unclear despite this being of interest to both scholars and practitioners. We use structural equation modeling to analyze empirical data from 144 employees in the United Kingdom's oil and gas industry, analyzing the nature and interrelationship of identification as individual-level (career advancement) and social-level (work group and organization) foci, as well as considering the two psychological self-presentation factors (value expression and social adjustment) that direct and drive identification processes. A dichotomy between individual and social components of work identity is found, revealing a strong association between both social-level foci of identification. Moreover, both components of work identity are found to be premised on different psychological factors, furthering our knowledge of the enmeshed nature of identity at work

Organizational resilience : how SUITS' local authorities were prepared to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic

This SUITS policy brief aims to highlight how the transformational process of the nine local authorities involved in SUITS into learning organizations made these cities far better prepared to cope with the challenges due to the pandemic than they would otherwise have been. Due to the higher levels of organizational resilience and the awareness of individuals' importance during such external crises, the nine local authorities were not just trying to react to the unforeseen challenges, but were able to act with a clear pathway and to use their experiences to facilitate their learning from recent years. Of course, the pandemic could not have been foreseen, but as SUITS local authorities are becoming learning organizations, they are enhancing their organizational capacity. In so doing, they have been learning a required resilience to reduce the "complexity and confusion - of what to do best" in the beginning of the crisis and to cope with the challenges. This advantage was of enormous relevance for the local authorities

Editorial: Sharing Economy and the Issue of (Dis)trust

Economy has changed; while in earlier times the possession of goods has been important to consumers, nowadays consumers rather try to have access to them (Belk, 2014). The so-called sharing economy enables consumers to share goods and services, such as rooms (cf. Airbnb), mobility services (cf. Blablacar), or self-produced vegetables (cf. community gardens). The Internet was key to the development of the sharing economy; with this achievement, the sharing economy expanded (Puschmann and Alt, 2016), and research on the sharing economy accumulated. Trust is a fundamental aspect that keeps the sharing economy running (Möhlmann, 2015). Trust means that consumers make themselves vulnerable toward different actors (Rousseau et al., 1998). There needs to be trust toward the sharing organization (e.g., Airbnb), toward consumers offering their goods and services, toward other consumers and also toward the technology providing the platform. Several articles (e.g., Kong et al., 2020) address the important issue of trust in the sharing economy, but the more or less antagonist of trust, i.e., distrust, has not been addressed in research so far. Distrust is often seen as an individual’s unwillingness to accept vulnerability to the actions of other people based on pervasive negative perceptions and expectations of the other people’s motives, intentions, or behaviors (Bijlsma-Frankema et al., 2015). The relevance of distrust often resonates implicitly in the publications on trust in the sharing economy (e.g., Möhlmann, 2015), but was not explicitly addressed in previous research. For that reason, the current Research Topic opens up a forum, in which research not only on trust but also on distrust in the sharing economy can gain center stage