Self concept is an evolving sense of self that encompasses work, expression of potential, and purpose for being. Self concept is more encompassing than identity, and includes motivations, beliefs such as self-efficacy, attributions and construals, mental models of self, and social roles. Self concept grows and evolves through life and transitions, but only seldom does the whole self concept come up for review and revision. Narrative construction provided an approach to examining how the stories individuals tell about themselves shape and help create their evolving self concept. The evolution of self concept is reviewed in light of the operation of the transition experiences – cognitive flexibility, generative intelligence, personal intelligences, motivation, and purpose through the use of retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

This chapter takes a social identity perspective on change leadership. Although leading change is considered to be an essential part of leadership in general, the empirical literature on this topic is relatively sparse. Yet, the social identity perspective provides valuable insights into this topic, in particular, shedding light on why individuals resist or support change and how leaders can play a role in facilitating positive change pathways. Drawing on this literature, we develop a multi-identity pathway model, which outlines how leaders can enable employee change adjustment by enhancing perceptions of identity continuity and identity gain during change processes. This model further explores the identity management behaviors that leaders can employ to inspire support for change, and the different (organizational, team, and occupational) identity foci that may facilitate positive change reactions. Finally, we discuss whether shared or distributed models of leadership are feasible leadership mechanisms in fostering strong post-change support among employees.

This chapter describes a personal intervention of work-life balance referred to as whole-life perspective — an approach to decision-making that considers possible consequences in work and nonwork life domains. The whole-life perspective in decision-making is implemented in terms of (1) evoking multiple identities in work-life decisions, (2) framing work-life decisions broadly, and (3) applying broadened rules to guide work-life decisions. We also discuss how instructors can use these three whole-life perspective principles to train employees to achieve greater work-life balance.