Doing as defense: Identity construction and the childhood roots of excessive work

Through an inductive study of knowledge professionals who work excessively, we develop a theoretical model explaining how individuals’ identity defenses generate and sustain workplace distress. We find that informants uniformly describe excessive work as distressing and rooted in a doer identity—a personal identity defined by the act of doing itself—which they constructed in childhood as a response to their caregivers’ excessive demands to do. In their accounts of these early experiences, we identify three distinct narratives of distress—centered on self-worth, safety, or recognition. In each narrative, we theorize that the doer identity functions as a false self defense , rooted in a specific intrapsychic dynamic— conforming, dissociative, or reflexive —that was effective in childhood. These false selves are carried into working life, where they prove ineffective: they are linked to different emotional experiences of excessive working and ways of relating to others at work that reproduce or amplify distress rather than ameliorate it. Our study integrates and expands theories of distress and identity defenses at work, excessive work, and psychodynamics.