Abstract:

This paper will share the initial findings of our research, which explored how some women have experienced flourishing through changes to identity salience during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way people work, the world over. As many workers have transitioned to working from home or hybrid working, new challenges emerged regarding how we work, live, and cope with the work life interface. Given the known data on the work that women perform outside of the context of their professional lives (i.e. domestic care, child care, elder care, etc.) and the significant time imbalance between the genders (Lips, 2013), these issues are even more pronounced during the pandemic. In this context working from home brings with it interesting contextual questions around how women coped with the changing reality of work. Early reports and antidotal evidence from social media and other sources suggest that while many women faced significant challenges in this changed work context, some women might have actually flourished in the new context of working from home or hybrid work. This however brings into focus the underlying mechanisms that might facilitate flourishing in this context, presenting an intriguing lacuna to be investigated.

“To flourish means to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience” (Fredrickson & Losada, 2005, p.678). Flourishing is a positive psychology concept which is increasingly finding a home in management research (Lee, 2019).

This paper looks specifically at women to investigate how they coped with the changes in their working arrangements due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The aim is to understand how some women flourished in the new working environment of the work from home landscape which was brought on during the pandemic. We also explore how or in what way women’s identities might play a role in promoting flourishing through identity salience shifts.

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Acting as a session chair: If your paper is accepted, would you agree to serve as a session chair for the Track you submitted to?: Yes

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Dr. Lyn Lanka