Between the devil and the deep blue sea: Exploring the hybrid identity narratives of ethnic minority professionals

•We adopt a narrative approach to study ethnic minority professionals’ identities.•We focus on their attempts to reconcile different cultural spheres and audiences.•Dealing with the identity challenge this entails, they construct hybrid identities.•However, social and political processes keep their identity tensions unresolved.•Abandoning hope for a better solution, they attempt to stabilize their narratives.

SummaryDrawing on a narrative approach to identity, this paper explores how ethnic minority employees attempt to craft coherent self-narratives while faced with the challenge of reconciling their work experiences in organizations dominated by the ethnic majority with their non-work affiliations, experiences and audiences. Our findings show that, in dealing with this challenge, individuals construct hybrid identities combining different cultural traditions, yet continue to experience identity tensions because of others’ contestation of their identity claims. This highlights how social and political processes, through maintaining traditional notions of difference, can limit the ability of hybrid identities to allow individuals to successfully reconcile different affiliations, roles and audiences. Our study further has implications for the diversity literature's understanding of ethnic identities.