Professional Personae - How Organizational Identification Shapes Online Identity in the Workplace

As organizations become increasingly mediatized, the roles of professionals are reshaped and negotiated, and the boundaries between professional and private relationships are blurred. In this context, the extent to which one identifies with his or her organization might play an important role. This paper investigates how professionals construct their digital identities on social media sites, focusing in particular on their willingness to overlap private and work profiles to create a univocal online persona. Based on a sample of 679 communication and marketing managers, the paper analyzes the self-representational choices of professionals and demonstrates how organizational identification influences professionals’ tendency to combine their domains under one online persona, and their confidence to use social media in a professional context.