Integration of Identities In The Post-Pandemic Workplace

Technological and economic innovations significantly changed the job market by making it possible to work from almost anywhere. During the COVID-19 pandemic, work remote has increased drastically. To examine the influence of such changes on the boundaries between identities, we focus on Boundary theory that define two strategies: integration and segmentation of identities. Based on this, we predict that today people have more integrated identities than differentiated compared to the pre COVID-19. We examine this by three studies: (1) 20 qualitative interviews with social network users, which are a platform for expressing identities, to understand the motivations to use social networks; (2) an online survey among 240 LinkedIn users, which is a platform for the expression of professional identity. The results indicated that the functional motivation predicted the preference to use LinkedIn; (3) big-data analysis using data extracted from LinkedIn to examine whether people integrate rather than segment their identities.