The Lit Review: An AMJ Podcast | Winnie Jiang (S5E2)

Hello, this is Sayku Burmese, your host of the Lit Review, a podcast brought to you by the Academy of Management Journal. In this podcast, we dive into the insights of recent research, publishing the journal, and interview authors to discuss the inspiration for research ideas and how insights from this research apply to current pressing issues in organizations and markets. In this episode, I speak with Winnie Zhang, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD. In our conversation, I talk with her about her recent AMJ paper about identity and entrepreneurship. The paper explores how entrepreneurs manage identity conflicts as they attempt to be a boss, despite coming from humble beginnings. We discuss the emotional work necessary to become a successful entrepreneur and how policy makers and mentors can support aspiring entrepreneurs. I hope that you will enjoy this episode of the Lit Review and my discussion with Winnie Zhang. My guest today on the Lit Review podcast is Winnie Zhang, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD. Her research focuses on the dynamics of meaning making it work, work as a calling, career mobility, and transitions. She seeks to answer questions about how individuals find, pursue, and sustain meaning in their work, really important topics, in complex and rapidly changing environments. She also considers how individuals quests for meaning and work influences organizations and the institutes to which they belong and how organizations can cultivate meaningful work experiences and career growth for the benefit of everybody, individuals, organizations and society. Hello, Winnie and welcome to the Lit Review podcast. Thank you very much for having me. It is my pleasure. So I'd like to start by discussing a recent AMJ paper that you published with your co-authors entitled Breaking Free or Locking in, How socially disadvantaged individuals achieve or reject an aspired identity in an entrepreneurial context. The paper explores how individuals manage identity conflict. My term, you probably have a fancier term to call it, that occur while they are pursuing entrepreneurial activities. So before we get into the paper, I always like to ask a kind of a big picture, what got you interested in the topic of identity and how it intertwines with entrepreneurship? Sure. To be honest, I didn't set out to study identity entrepreneurship. As you mentioned, just now my research interests, I've just always been drawn to stories of people overcoming challenges to achieve something meaningful through their work or in their career. And someone I know when I visited China end of 2019 mentioned this beauty salon business to me that gives employees a shot at entrepreneurship and these employees are all women from very humble backgrounds, which is typical for people working at beauty salons in China. So that immediately pick my interest, especially since that some of these women had become incredibly successful and transformed their lives in some way. So I wanted to learn more and hear more about their stories. At that time, my co-author, Amy Zhao Ding, was in her last year as a PhD student at INSEA. So I just joined INSEA as a assistant professor that same year in July. And I've known Amy before, but when I met her in person, it was when we started talking about research more deeply and we decided we want to do something together. We just haven't figured out what or in what context. And at the same time, so Shelley just got the offer to become a PhD student in the OB area at INSEA. And by reading her application while she was applying, I knew that she was someone that's also interested in this kind of personal change type of a story. So I asked her if she would be willing, just to join the project, to maybe learn. And she very happily said, yes, so this is how we got together and started this project. So back to how I got to identity entrepreneurship. When I started doing some pilot interviews with this woman, I expected to hear about how this entrepreneurial opportunity significantly changed their long eyes, how they're grateful for this opportunity and stuff like that, in many ways it did. But what really struck me was how much fear and self doubt they were carrying with them as they are embarking on this journey, even as they were succeeding. They were still sort of carrying with them very heavy sense of self doubt and fear. On the outside, it looked like an amazing life changing opportunities, but internally, they were wrestling with deep emotional struggles. And as I dug deeper, I realized that a lot of these had to do with how they saw themselves. There are existing identities, and how that clash with what they thought it meant to be a successful entrepreneur or a boss in their own terms. So that's what really pulled me into exploring more deeply identity entrepreneurship and read more about the literature. That's great. And the beauty, I guess, of the inductive research that you conducted here is that you get to kind of think about, all right, this is a phenomenon that's of interest to me. And I'm starting to discover things. And so you can kind of craft the story as you dig deeper in and do more interviews. And he did quite a number of interviews over many years. So could I see you in your research team? I think Shelley got her money's worth, right? She came in sight unseen and now is like, oh, I know how to interview. I know I know qualitative methods. So you want to talk about what are kind of the high level takeaways, or would you say is the central finding of this paper as it relates to this identity conflict with entrepreneurs? Yeah, I will try to sum up the central findings as maybe three big takeaways. And first, I think what we find is that for people from this advantage backgrounds, an entrepreneurial opportunity isn't just about making money or being their own boss, even though that's, you know, of course, what they hope to achieve. It is also deeply emotional and stirs up identity conflicts, as you mentioned earlier. On one hand, it sparks their ambition and a sense of possibility and hope. On the other hand, it really magnifies their disadvantage identities, like in our context, being woman from rural parts of China with very limited education and very heavy caregiving responsibility. So it brings up these fears and self-doubts that can feel like internal identity roadblocks or hurdles. This is something that we want to sort of highlight more as one part of our findings. And second, people can navigate this identity conflict in one of three ways. Some take what we call the elevation path and they dive in with enthusiasm. They will push aside their doubts and fears and basically fake it until they make it. And that's why, you know, like, I guess I've been told that one. I know that baby. Yeah. That's my well-known approach to deal with fears and self-doubts. Eventually, they just sort of insert that entrepreneurial identity into their self-concept. And other people, they take what we call the experimentation path. These people, they're excited, but they are also anxious and they're open about their anxiety. So they seek support and they learn along the way and they find ways to see their backgrounds as some sort of an asset rather than a barrier in this process. And then there is this people on the entrenchment path. These individuals feel overwhelmed by fear, struggle to manage their negative emotions and ultimately, they decided to pull back, devaluing the idea of being entrepreneur altogether. And finally, the last takeaway I will say is that when we show there are these three paths and immediately I ask myself, what determines which path someone takes or why people are on the steering path and can they actually shift path. And there are two key things we find. This is that how they make sense of their past values seem to play some role in shaping where or which path they are on. Do they fixate on their past values or do they see these past experiences of failures as learning experiences. And second is what we call the interpersonal sense making. Is do they have people around them who can help them see their situation and themselves in a new light, in a very personalized way. These factors can shape whether someone pushes forward or adapts or eventually retreats from entrepreneurship. Wow. So a lot there. So a couple of things just pop into my mind as you were kind of talk taking us to. And so the first I always want to start with is the emotional side. Right. And this is something that I think really pops out from the paper which is as much as this is a cognitive idea and rational and you're thinking about stuff. Some of the biggest hindrances aren't about raising enough money. It's about am I good enough, right? The imposter syndrome that a lot of these people in your study experienced. And these are, you know, to become a boss of us shop, right? You know, this isn't like, hey, I got to pitch my idea to VC. You know, this is, you think it's small players, but for them it's really big. So to what extent were you surprised how emotion leaped out from the people you were speaking with? Was it something that you thought? Yeah, it's probably there. Were you taken aback by it? I would say, like I said at the beginning, I expected them to show more positive emotions. Actually, you know, being, you know, like someone that finally I got an opportunity to change my lives, because that people will have been living with a lot of constraints, with a lot of sense of, I guess, a lack of hope in really significantly transforming their lives socioeconomically and psychologically. Yeah. So I expect them to say, Oh, wow, I'm really glad that I work for this organization that now gives me this opportunity and gives me a chance. And some they do actually many of the participants we spoke to who are on the elevation path. They do express a stronger level of enthusiasm, passion, or the other positive emotions. But you could hear between the lines when you're talking to them that they are struggling a lot with those negative emotions. Initially, I didn't expect to, I guess, unpack these negative emotions as sort of the main aim or focus of this paper. But after I heard them through these interviews, even just between the lines, I just need to really dive in because this is something that we, I guess, we didn't talk enough about in the entrepreneurship domain. So again, an inductive paper, it is a discovery path, but was there anything that you haven't talked about that was unexpected, something that you found that made you say, Wow, I would not have predicted that to be the case, something that you learned. Oh, yeah. There were definitely some surprises. And I want to highlight two things that really stood out to me. First, when we identified the three paths, the elevation, the experimentation and trenchman path, it seemed obvious that the first two paths were the success stories because those individuals eventually adopted, embraced the entrepreneur identity. They started to see themselves entrepreneur and become successful entrepreneurs, while the last group who abandoned their business seemed like they had failed in some way. But that's not necessarily true. Many of the people on the entrenchment path, those ones that walk away from their business decided to close down and go back to their employee role, they were actually happier for it. And they gained the clarity about what they wanted. They realized the entrepreneurial life wasn't for them. And they felt totally at peace returning to the stable employment. We had this remarkable quote in the paper and I want to read it so that people get a sense of what they're feeling, people on the entrenchment path. So one person that one big thing I learned from the whole experience of starting my own salon is that I very much enjoy seeing other people become a better version of themselves. Because of me, I don't have to do that by starting a business. I can do that and probably do that better as a manager because I don't have to think about many other things like how to get more. As you could see, right, to me, this was eye-opening because we often assume that not pursuing an initial goal is a failure, but sometimes choosing not to adopt an identity that you initially thought you aspire and wanted can be also a success in yourself. I can, yeah, as a sort of a surprise, fine, is that people on the elevation path seem more objectively successful. These individuals, they make more money and many already started or planned to expand their business. But at the same time, they struggle more with their well-being because they constantly felt the pressure to suppress any signs of self-doubt or their disadvantage backgrounds. And in contrast, those on the experimentation path who embrace both their aspirations and their roots, they seem to navigate things with a healthier balance. This really highlights to me that how entrepreneurs and even leaders in general, how they do with their identities, and especially some of those quote-unwanted identities, can deeply affect not just their performance, but also their mental health. Well, those are, I did not expect those to be the ones you brought up. Those are great. So, you know, my brain can't help but go to this direction, which is, I'm like, you know, I was thinking, all right, fake it till you make it, just push through. It's great to know the other side. And it's like, no, there's a cost, right? There's a cost to kind of forcing your way through, which is you don't ever really deal with the feelings. You just, again, fake it. Whereas those that, and you talk about seeking support and making it known that you're anxious, right? And those sorts of things can actually help. And maybe you don't make as much money, right? And now it's a small end, so you don't want to generalize too far, but seeing that even in a qualitative state, I think, is really, is really powerful. And obviously, the first point you mentioned is just gold, right? That the reason you try to go out on a limb, entrepreneurship is risky. The reason to do it really is not that you're going to make a million dollars, is that you want to see if you can do it. And that's if you like to do it. And if you find out you don't, that's actually a really valuable experience, because then afterwards you can say, I can go back to this other thing and sleep well, instead of worrying about this counterfactual, right? That's great. All right. I hope you were a blessing to somebody listening to this somewhere. Okay. I want to kind of expand out a bit on this and think about, you know, this is a popular topic, right? How entrepreneurs can power through it and what predicts success and that process. There are a lot of organizations, these entrepreneurs support organizations that are solely focused on helping entrepreneurs. And I think your paper is a vehicle to learn how to do that. So are there any things that you can think about that might be useful to those kind of organizations thinking incubators, accelerators that can help entrepreneurs kind of work through this? Of course. And particularly, I guess our paper offers insights on how these organizations can more effectively help entrepreneurs from relatively more socially disadvantaged backgrounds. And a lot of these entrepreneurs from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, they struggle greatly with fears of failures and self-doubt. Not just because starting a business is tough, but because of the way they see themselves has been so deeply ingrained. And their family and educational backgrounds or social status can make them feel like they don't belong in the entrepreneurial world. And that's why incubators and entrepreneurship programs need to go beyond just providing funding or technical skills they should help, particularly these people recognize where their doubts and fears are coming from and give them tools to manage those negative emotions whenever they bubble up and to particularly people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds is negative emotions can bubble up very frequently. And they actually carry a lot of cognitive emotional burdens as they embark on entrepreneurship journey trying to deal with all these negative emotions. So our research points out the important role of what I just mentioned in her personal sense making, right, which can include things like personalize mentorship, like attentive mentorship, which is not just standardized, made for everybody, but someone that really deeply understands what people coming from is socially disadvantaged background is going through who can provide a space and relationship for these people to share openly these doubts, the fears, all the negative emotions they experience during this journey. And maybe guided reflection exercises that help them shape how they see themselves in their daily interactions as they launch their business. And when programs tackle these emotional and identity challenges alongside building these people's business skills on North can build the confidence and emotional resilience they need to succeed. All right. You said the magic word emotional resilience and so, you know, I've been thinking a lot about resilience here at UNC we had like resilience was like our theme for our institute over the last year. So I think a lot about it and I think most people think about emotional resilience as no matter what happens to me, I'll be for I'll power through it. I think you're talking about something different when you're talking about emotional resilience here. I just wanted to ask like, so what does that look like because I think I think of resilient people as strong people that can withstand anything and this doesn't seem to be exactly that, right? Entrepreneurs want to believe I'm strong enough. I have the, you know, I'm willing to take risks, but this resilience thing. So what are your thoughts on emotional resilience and is this a good characteristic? Is it the way I'm thinking about it? Is that how you think about it or you think about it in a different way? Yeah. So I will share how I think about it and I would love to use this as an opportunity just to invite more people to maybe share their thoughts on what emotional resilience is about and how they have experienced it in themselves, right? So what we found in the paper is that some people, they sort of enact this emotional resilience by like those on the elevation path, they just suppress or push aside the negative emotions whenever they feel and that's a form of emotional resilience. I think because it does help you deal with whatever challenges that you are facing at that moment. And that's also, I think, is as effective as long as you can feel that you can still, you know, keep yourself going in a stressful or challenging experience. And there are also other people who enact emotional resilience like those in our paper who are on the experimentation path and they're open about it. So that's another sort of effective regulation tool, right, to deal with the negative emotions that bubble as you are navigating a stressful situation. I think both are valid as long as people find that helpful, right? But what seems to come out from our, from our research is that the second approach that you openly share about it and seek support to do with the negative emotions, maybe not at that particular moment, but maybe later and you don't continue to suppress the negative emotions. And that open sharing approach can actually make you more sustainable in this journey. And why do I say that because you don't have to spend a lot of cognitive emotional energy, sort of suppressing that you are sort of allowing yourself to accept that and find more effective tools, ways and understandings of these emotions. And eventually you start to see first the roots of these negative emotions that are coming from, you know, how you understand the meanings of some of the identities that are maybe socially disadvantaged, that you've been carrying with you, and you don't necessarily need to be burdened by these negative or disadvantaged identities and you start to refrain the meanings of them. So eventually in your head, you probably start to see whatever identities you have and your new identity of being a boss or being an entrepreneur can be synergistic or mutually enhancing. So those people in our paper who are on the experimentation path, they start to talk about their existing identities in such a way that they said it's exactly because I'm a woman from rural part of China. I know what it means to eat bitterness. That's how they told me, you know, I know you basically bear or kinds of challenges and still persist through it. So this is actually a very commonly used phrase, you know, you are in China, you know how to eat bitterness, you can taste the sweetness later. So that's how these women have been telling me, like they think it's exactly because of those backgrounds they have, you know, being a woman from rural China, you know how to eat bitterness and that ability is what they think is key to succeeding as entrepreneurs. I'm writing that down, eat bitterness, that's a whole word, that's a whole word. I was thinking about this conversation thing and if I could sum it up, there have been multiple times in the last couple of years where I've seen someone in the public sphere that seemed to be just making bad mistakes and I always thought to myself, do they have a group chat, do they have a group chat because that's where I go when I'm, I don't know if this is a good idea. Does this make sense and I go to a group chat and it's, you know, five or six people and you can share your anxieties and they either tell you, oh, you actually maybe you should rethink this. So what I heard you say with the being able to talk it through and also stay in the group chat, get you a good group chat and utilize that. So every entrepreneur should have a group chat and not the 80 people on it where people are just plugging this stuff like a real group chat with real friends. All right. So we are, we're getting close to time. So I want to end us on two kind of fun questions. The first is kind of thinking about you and kind of what you're working on now, right? We were talking before we started recording. The interesting thing about when a paper is published and yours just, you know, went into press recently is you stopped looking at it like six months before it goes into press sometimes more and you're on to like nine other things. And so I want to get a sense right right now. What are the things that are peaking your curiosity? What are the phenomena that you see out there that you're like, huh, I wonder why that's happening and there's so much happening in the world today that I'm sure you're like me. You have more ideas than you could possibly follow up on. But what are the things happening right now that are peaking your curiosity? Absolutely. There are always sort of more questions to ask than we can find answers for. And in fact, since doing this research, I found myself whether it's consciously, unconsciously, I couldn't tell, but I found myself paying more attention to spaces where socially disadvantaged individuals are either changing themselves or the people around them. And maybe they're doing so intently or unintentionally, I don't know. So I want to maybe share two specific settings that in particular have really picked my curiosity and I'm now actively doing research on both. So the first is open source communities. I guess many of you are familiar with this concept already. Most research on these open source communities have focused on highly skilled members, right? And they often treat the socially disadvantaged individuals as passive participants who are just benefiting from what those highly skilled members are contributing or even see them as free riders. But I came across an open source community recently where people from disadvantaged backgrounds were actually experiencing profound transformations, both socio-economically and psychologically. They go from lacking confidence and direction or sense of purpose to finding a real clear sense of purpose and confidence in themselves. But that got me thinking, what is it about this particular community that foster such, again, I think it's an identity shift and how does participation in a seemingly technical space, right? This is a community that provides them with some technical resources, lead them to such deep identity changes. And some of it, as you could have already guessed, is it related to human capital, right? They learn some new and in particular in this age related to machine learning or AI. That can help them, you know, in some way get better jobs, but what I noticed and have observed so far is that there's something deeper and I'm exploring, right, how being in an open source community can actually be a very transformative experience for a lot of disadvantaged individuals who are who feel that they have been constrained by these identities. And the second setting is a coffee shop chain that employs people with mental unises that I recently encountered. So what's fascinating here to me isn't just the employees experiences, is the transformation that's happening among their managers who don't have mental unises themselves. Through working closely with their employees who have mental unises, these managers actually share that they have experienced significant personal growth and they have challenged their own assumptions about work, what it means to be a leader, a manager and even their own identity. So my co-authors and I are now exploring how working alongside socially disadvantaged individuals can be a catalyst for deeper personal and professional growth. Yeah, no, I love that it's the shift from, yeah, it helps those individuals, but it also helps a lot of others to see and be inspired by learn from individuals that come from different kind of backgrounds. So those are two very fascinating ones, wow, and both, I feel like you're going to be back on this podcast soon when those come out, so that's great. And the context, I did want to say this one thing first, the last final question is, socially disadvantaged is a broad term. And one of the things that I found interesting with your paper is you read the title and you don't know what maybe you have a preconceived notion and it wasn't what I thought, but I think it's very generalizable, because everyone knows what it feels like to say, hey, I'm in a space and I don't feel like I am as equipped as others in this space. Doesn't matter, you know, you have a socioeconomic and a gender, but in other places, it might just be socioeconomic. It could be regional, it could be nationality, language, race, ethnicity, et cetera. And so I do love the fact that this is talking about something that I think everyone is thinking about, but there is, for sure, some, how do we say, conversations happening right now about what you can and can't do to help people who have historical disadvantages. And so research like this and policy work and people doing this work, I think is really important. Okay. What are you reading for fun, purely for fun, no articles, no books about meaning at work, what are you reading just for fun? Oh, I love this question. So I have two little kids, one, three-year-old son and a one and a half-year-old daughter. So as you can imagine, life is pretty chaotic for me most of the time and parenting to small children is amazing, you know, but it can also be overwhelming. So to keep my sanity, I found that laughter is the best medicine and one of my favorite ways to relax and build my own emotional resilience, especially by reading funny parenting comics. So I usually just scroll through a few of those comics that pop up on my Instagram account before going to bed. It's like a little reset button for my brain. And one that may not, yes, recently, and I want to share one, you know, so you know what I was talking about. So it was the two images side by side and on one side of the image is showed a kid dramatically rejecting every single thing on their dinner plate. And in this image, this kid is happily stuffing random things they found on the floor into their mouth. So, yeah, so it's just small things like this and I will laugh and then happily go to bed. So, but I think finding useful in the chaos sometimes does help myself feel like I set emotional resilience. So, yeah, I don't have, yeah, inspirational stuff, no, that is inspirational. I'm with you. I'm not even sure if the comics will happen when I was a PhD student, I used to read, what's it called? PhD comic. Do you ever read this, a PhD comic? Yeah. I know it would just be like these frazel PhD students and their advisors, you know, just making them wait for years and years to meet with them. I was just like, this, this is helpful. That was definitely therapy. And I think it was like one a day and I would go to a website and I would read it and laugh and be like, whoo, all right, I can go on with my life. So yeah, laughter is the best medicine. All right. Well, I'm glad that you're getting that. Feel free to send me, email me some funny ones you get. I have a 14 year old and 11 year old, so it's different, but still the same, still the same. But thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you for taking the time. It's been great to hear about this and it's really important and really interesting research. I encourage everyone listening to check it out. I'm sure you will be seeing some aspect of this paper in your feed in one way or another because it's got a lot of really good takeaways. So thanks for sharing with us today. Thank you again. All right. That's it for the lit review. I appreciate Winnie for her time and I appreciate you all for listening. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the lit review podcast. You can find us by searching the lit review and AMJ podcast on iTunes, Spotify and other podcast platforms as well as on the AMJ homepage. You can also follow us on LinkedIn where we host a weekly show called AMJ Radio Live that's hosted by AOM Connect. Thanks to the Academy of Management for their support for this podcast. Special thanks to my producer, Holly Fearing. For all of her work behind the scenes, our theme music is produced by Key to Life. This is Seiku Burmese. See you next time. Take care and be good. [Music]