Professionalize the Personal: Online Professional Identity Using Impression Management Among Junior Employees

How do junior employees use different online impression management techniques to construct their online professional identities? And how is their online personal identity reconstructed on social media platforms? This exploratory research argues that there are overlapping, intersecting, and dominating spaces between the personal and the professional, where social media platforms are not neutral stages of self-performance as much as they are powerful tools, alongside other dominant organizational structures, for continuously reconstructing multiple selves. Inspired by Goffman’s theoretical framework of the formation of social selves and the notion of impression management of ‘self-presentation’, this research intends to better understand how junior employees manage their online impressions and ‘professionalize’ their social media content for different work-related reasons and how their digital personal identity intersects with their professional identity. In-depth interviews with 30 junior employees from various working fields revealed three key impression management techniques: anonymize/de-anonymize identities, self-surveillance, and sacrifice the personal. This research extends and deepens our understanding of Goffman’s framework of how online impression management techniques are employed, either willingly or unwillingly, to construct our online professional identity.