My Place: How Workers Become Identified with Their Workplaces and Why It Matters

Where we work—our workplaces—have enormous effects on our work attitudes and behaviors. As workplaces become increasingly mobile, remote, multiple, and uncoupled from the organization for which the work is done, individuals—and their employers—struggle with the question, “How does this place affect me and what I do?” We need new theoretical insights into how workplaces shape our experience of work and important outcomes such as well-being, boundary management, and territoriality. To do so, we describe the phenomenology of how our workplaces become deeply intertwined with our sense of self at work, particularly in the modern context. Our model explains how the functional, social, aesthetic, and temporal dimensions of the workplace, and the holistic and immersive experiences that result, affect workplace identification via sensemaking processes, and the outcomes that result.