When Your Job Changes, Does Your Sense of Who You Are Change Too?
You can be doing well in your career and still find yourself feeling strangely unsettled when your role changes. Perhaps you've taken on a promotion, moved into a different organisation or found that your existing job has gradually become something quite different from the one you originally accepted.
On paper, everything may look positive. You have new responsibilities and opportunities to develop, yet something about the work no longer feels quite as comfortable or familiar as it once did. Part of the difficulty may be that our jobs contribute more to our sense of identity than we sometimes realise.
A recent study published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology offers an interesting perspective on this. Researchers Danielle Tucker and Jane Hendy examined how 24 change-management professionals working across six public-sector organisations responded to evolving roles and expectations. Their findings suggest that the adjustments people make to their work can involve a much deeper process of trying to establish, protect or reconsider their professional identity.
The researchers were interested in something called job crafting. This describes the ways people actively reshape aspects of their work, perhaps by taking on different responsibilities, developing relationships or changing how they think about their contribution.
Job crafting is often presented as a positive approach to improving satisfaction and finding greater meaning at work. If your job doesn't quite suit you, perhaps you can adjust parts of it to make better use of your abilities or reflect what matters to you. That sounds sensible, and sometimes it works very well. What makes this research particularly interesting is that the experience wasn't always so straightforward.
The researchers found that people could become caught in repeated attempts to make their work fit their understanding of themselves. An adjustment might resolve one difficulty but create another, leaving them continually renegotiating their role and their place within it.
Finding Your Place in a Changing Role
One of the patterns identified in the study concerned people who were uncertain about what their role actually required of them. This is easy to recognise in career transitions. Someone moves into a new position with a broad job description, but the reality depends on relationships, organisational expectations and responsibilities that may not yet be clearly defined. In trying to establish themselves, they become particularly helpful. They take on additional work, make themselves available and become involved in activities that extend beyond their original responsibilities. Much of this may come from a genuine desire to contribute and demonstrate their ability.
Over time, however, the role can expand beyond what is manageable. Other people come to expect the additional contribution, and what began as an attempt to find a place in the organisation becomes an increasingly demanding way of working.
The researchers observed that people sometimes responded by trying to regain control, narrowing their responsibilities or withdrawing from activities that had become difficult to sustain. Yet even that adjustment could have consequences. Stepping back might reduce the immediate pressure while leaving someone feeling less influential or less recognised for their contribution. The study describes these experiences as recurring cycles rather than a straightforward progression towards a settled professional identity.
When Your Work No Longer Reflects Who You Think You Are
There is another aspect of this research that I find particularly relevant to career development. We often think about career decisions in terms of skills, opportunities and what someone wants to achieve next. But our work also gives us a way of understanding ourselves. Someone may have spent years being the person others rely on for technical expertise. Moving into leadership means their contribution increasingly depends on enabling other people to do the work, rather than doing it themselves.
They may welcome the opportunity and understand why the change matters, while still miss the satisfaction and recognition that came with being the expert. Similarly, someone who has built a career around helping others may find themselves in a more senior position where difficult decisions sometimes disappoint the very people they want to support.
These examples are not findings from the study itself, but they illustrate why a career transition can feel more complicated than a change of responsibilities. We may need to reconsider what being good at our work means, particularly when the qualities that helped us succeed in an earlier role are no longer the ones by which our contribution is judged.
The researchers also found that participants sometimes changed their own definitions of value and success when adjusting their work was no longer enough. They began to think differently about what constituted a worthwhile contribution, particularly where important aspects of their work were not easily recognised by others. That seems an important part of career development. Our understanding of success may need to change as our careers develop, and it can take time to become comfortable with that.
What Might This Mean for Career Transitions?
One implication is that it may be worth paying more attention to how people experience a transition, even when the move appears to have been successful. Someone can have the skills required for a new role and still be uncertain about how they fit into it. They may be working extremely hard to establish themselves without recognising that some of their efforts are creating difficulties of their own. This is where having time to think can be particularly valuable.
Rather than immediately asking what someone needs to do differently, it may help to explore how they understand their role, what they believe others expect of them and which parts of their previous professional identity they are finding difficult to leave behind.
There may also be a need to examine the environment itself. The study highlights the importance of clearer expectations, conversations about responsibilities and recognition of work that can otherwise go unnoticed. It would be easy to read the findings and conclude that people simply need to become better at setting boundaries. Sometimes that may be useful, but it overlooks the part played by organisations in creating unclear or conflicting expectations.
Career development is rarely something we do entirely on our own. For those considering a more substantial career change, the findings also raise an interesting possibility. It may not always be a question of whether we need a different job. Sometimes we need to understand what has changed in our relationship with the work we already do. Equally, there are occasions when we have spent so long adapting ourselves to a role, that we haven't properly considered whether it still suits us.
The study doesn't tell us which choice to make. It does, however, offer a useful reminder that the way we experience our work can change considerably even when our abilities remain the same.
There are limits to what we can conclude from the research. This was a qualitative study involving a small group of professionals working in change-management roles, where shifting expectations and unclear boundaries are particularly common. We shouldn't assume that everyone experiences the same difficulties or that job crafting is generally harmful. Nevertheless, it gives us something worth considering when thinking about our own careers. We may spend a great deal of time developing the skills needed for the next stage without giving quite as much attention to the person we are becoming along the way.
Questions to Consider
Has your role changed in ways that have affected how you see yourself professionally?
Are you taking on responsibilities because they genuinely matter to you, or because you feel you need to demonstrate your value?
Is there something about an earlier stage of your career that you are finding difficult to leave behind?
Does your current definition of success still reflect what matters to you?
Try This This Week
Think about how you would have described yourself professionally five years ago and how you would describe yourself today.
Consider what has changed beyond your job title or responsibilities. Perhaps your understanding of what you contribute has developed, or something that once mattered enormously now feels less important.
If you are currently considering a career move, ask yourself what you hope to gain from it and whether there is anything about your existing professional identity that you may be reluctant to leave behind.
You may find that understanding those changes helps you think a little more clearly about what you want from the next stage of your career.
Research reference:
Tucker, D. A. & Hendy, J. (2026). Crafting and recrafting the self: Cycles of identity struggle in job crafting. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 99, e70159.
https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.70159
This article draws on the research findings and considers their possible relevance to career transitions and development. The broader career examples and reflective questions are applications of the research rather than findings directly tested by the study authors.