From the Beach to the Sahara - A qualitative study of junior management consultants' identity work between billable projects

Sammanfattning: The recent economic downturn has largely affected businesses around the world, resulting in decreased demand for management consultancy services. In combination with recent years' aggressive hiring strategies, this has put many junior management consultants in a position where their utilization rates have plummeted and time between billable projects has increased notably. As management consulting is an industry often associated with long work hours and high tempo and the phenomenon of underutilization is an area without much previous research, this creates an important question to study from both a theoretical and practical standpoint. Through a qualitative multiple case study, this thesis explores why underutilization may threaten the identities of junior management consultants at elite firms, and how they, in turn, handle this threat through identity work. We develop a theoretical lens inspired by, among others, Ahuja et al. (2019), to investigate the identity composition of the consultants, why the time between billable projects threatens these identities, and what identity work strategies they utilize to cope with the situation. Our findings imply that the consultants' identities are amalgamations of professional, elite, and performance-based identities, which are threatened by three aspects of time between billable projects in particular - task expectation dissonance, concerns for career implications, and being in low demand. In turn, these are handled through four main identity work strategies - idealizing, reframing, distancing, and relinquishing control. Furthermore, the study finds that the identities, extent of identity threat, and choice of identity work strategy are all affected by organizational and cultural aspects of their employers. With our findings, we contribute to an increased understanding of identity and identity work among high-performing young professionals and an increased practical understanding of management consultancies on how their organizations and company culture may affect their employees experiencing underutilization.