When and Why Managers Should Not Bring Their Whole Self to Work

Organizations encourage their managers to bring their whole selves to work, so as to give their very best. However, research has repeatedly highlighted managers’ difficulties in switching between nonwork and work identities. The present investigation supports these concerns by extensively showing that managers often decide against objective market research insights when they perceive this data as threatening to their nonwork identity. In three experiments, we find a nonwork identity bias deleteriously affecting sound decision-making. It is such that the more market research information conflicts with managers’ nonwork identity, the more managers decide against this information, causing them to make suboptimal decisions. We further find that a defensive mechanism triggers this bias. Following recent calls to minimize managerial decision biases at an organizational level, we further identify exchange relationships between managers and market research providers as a factor that can mitigate the bias, presumably because it helps managers to interpret market research insights less personally; in contrast, a communal relationship between managers and market research providers does not mitigate the bias. Implications of this last finding go counter to research celebrating the benefits of rapport, to resonate instead with emerging work on rapport’s potential to backfire.