Should I Stay or Should I Go? Why Fitting in at Work Is a Moving Target

A smiling man wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt and a loose striped tie carries a cardboard box of his belongings after being fired or laid off or quitting — Source: Shutterstock

Published on: May 12, 2025 at 7:54 pm

Just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how well you fit in your current job is a personal feeling that can change quickly.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Review article on how people craft career narratives that affect how they fit in at work, with Karen Jansen of North Carolina State University, said people tell stories to themselves and others that reinforce who they think they are and who they want to be.

“If you want to craft the story that keeps you at your organization, you will pick and choose the information that makes a past comparison or a future comparison that makes the present look better,” Shipp said. “If you want to leave your organization, you’re going to look for all the things that make it worse—‘My last job was so much better’ or ‘I bet if I went to that company, this would be better.’

“You can craft whatever story you want, and that’s where I think leaders have a great impact—not just asking employees what their stories are over time and how well they fit, but also helping them to craft a compelling career narrative,” she said.

Shipp speaks from experience.

“I was a department chair—I just finished my term about 18 months ago—and one of the things I would tell people during the pandemic is, ‘Let’s look at what’s working,’” Shipp said. “There’s a lot that got broken in the pandemic, so it can feel like ‘What’s happening?’ to the university and policies and the world, and ‘Should I go someplace else?’”

“Instead, I said, ‘Let’s focus our attention on what is working and why we’re here at TCU, all the things that brought us here’. That constancy is really important when a lot of things are changing,” she said.

“From the organizational change literature, we know that focusing on what’s constant and not changing is as important as what is changing, so leaders can help shape the story by drawing attention to the elements that make that present moment look better.”

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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