Longing for the Road Not Taken: The Affective and Behavioral Consequences of Forgone Identity Dwelling

The literature on identity construction has argued that employees work to create coherent and distinctive identities that encapsulate individual characteristics and professional and organizational memberships. Models of identity construction have suggested that a past career decision-choosing one professional "road" while leaving behind a "road not taken"-should lose its salience over time. We challenged that consensus by introducing the construct of forgone identity dwelling-thinking about and reflecting on a professional path that could have been. Our field and experimental studies showed that employees did dwell on forgone professional identities, even when the decision events that resulted in them were years in the past. Drawing on cognitive-motivational-relational theory, we showed that forgone identity dwelling resulted in longing-a yearning for something missing. Such longing created a "double-edged sword" for the behavioral consequences of forgone identity dwelling. On the one hand, longing was associated with increased withdrawal behavior and decreased helping behavior because employees were distracted from the here and now. On the other hand, longing was associated with job crafting that in turn reduced those reactions-particularly for employees with an internal locus of control. We discuss the implications of our work for models of identity construction.