Advancing a Richer View of Identity at Work: The Role‐Based Identity Scale

Identity has been studied extensively in several fields including organizational behavior, sociology, and psychology. Even though there have been significant advances, 2 areas of work deserve more attention. First, most empirical investigations have looked only at 1 or 2 identities at a time despite theoretical perspectives that indicate a need to address multiple identities simultaneously. Second, limited work using identity theory has been done in the human resource management (HRM) domain. The purpose of our research is to serve as a catalyst for future work by identifying 5 work‐relevant role‐based identities and creating a parsimonious measure for each. These metrics were tested, and initial evidence of their validity is provided using 6 independent samples. The empirical results suggest that the new measures in the role‐based identity scale can be useful in representing a more realistic and richer view of identity at work by simultaneously assessing 5 distinct role‐based identities.