Sexual Identity Management Strategies and Occupational Well-Being: A Latent Profile Analysis

In this study, we adopted the latent profile analysis (LPA) to examine whether the sexual identity management profiles relate to different occupational well-being including job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and depressive symptoms. A total of 225 Hong Kong Chinese full-time employees were recruited online. Four profiles were identified, namely, passive ( n = 31), integration dominant ( n = 81), hiding ( n = 21), and balanced ( n = 92). Results suggest that integration-dominant employees tended to report higher job satisfaction but lower emotional exhaustion and depressive symptoms. In contrast, employees with hiding profiles (i.e., high on counterfeiting and avoidance but low on integration) reported the lowest job satisfaction and highest emotional exhaustion and depressive symptoms. The limitations and implications of this study were also discussed.

The role of co-workers in the production of (homo)sexuality at work: A Foucauldian approach to the sexual identity processes of gay and lesbian employees

Adopting a Foucauldian perspective that focuses on the way power contributes to ensuring that sexuality leads a discursive existence, this study investigates the role of co-workers in the production of gay and lesbian employees’ sexuality. Drawing on interviews with 31 employees who self-identify as gay or lesbian, this article makes three contributions to the literature on sexual minorities’ identities at work. First, it shows how the production of sexuality is shaped by relations of attribution, evocation and circulation, which involve sexualizing practices through which co-workers directly contribute to ensuring that employees become sexually intelligible. By shaping the way sexual identities can be managed, these practices can turn the production of sexuality into a process that is not only unmanageable, but also even unmanaged by gay and lesbian employees themselves. Second, this article shows how an important element in sexual identity management is negotiating relations of truthfulness and inclusion, and constructing the occupied sexual subject position as positive or necessary. Third, it shows the connections between these different relations, which can occur and work together to ensure that all individuals come to be linked to a clear sexual identity.

Testing a Social Cognitive Model of Workplace Sexual Identity Management

Lent and Brown proposed a social cognitive career self-management process model that extended prior social cognitive career theory (SCCT) content models to explain the conditions under which people will engage in career management behaviors (e.g., career exploration). We tested the SCCT self-management model in the context of workplace sexual identity management. The model hypothesizes that engagement in sexual identity management strategies in the workplace is facilitated by strong sexual identity management self-efficacy beliefs and positive outcome expectations for engaging in sexual identity management behaviors. The model also posits that additional person and contextual variables will influence engagement in sexual identity management behaviors directly as well as indirectly via self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations. Using a sample of 152 sexual minority participants drawn from community Internet mailing lists, partial and full mediation models of workplace sexual identity disclosure were tested using theoretically relevant person input (i.e., concealment motivation) and contextual (i.e., workplace climate) variables. Results supported a partially mediated model suggesting that concealment motivation and workplace climate influence workplace disclosure directly as well as indirectly through self-efficacy and positive outcome expectations. Policy and social justice implications for the results are discussed and future research directions are considered.