Self-presentations are goal-directed acts designed by individuals to convey particular images of their selves and thereby influence how they are perceived and treated by various audiences (Goffman, 1959). Recent literature suggests that individuals are increasingly interacting with their workplace colleagues on personal networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. In such overlapping interactions, individuals often move swiftly and in an asymmetric fashion between physical-virtual settings and personal-professional life. Presumably, diverse self-presentations across physical-virtual settings and personal-professional life may create conflicts or tensions. Drawing on 31 semi-structured interviews, this thesis explores the self-presentations of Indian IT professionals on social media. Overall, the analysis suggests that in most cases, respondents enacted diverse self-presentations across physical-virtual settings and personal-professional life. In such cases, they expressed concerns that overlapping audiences may view their self-presentations on social media out-of-context and inevitably misconstrue their professional image. From a theoretical perspective, the thesis illustrates that individuals who exercise region behavior experience cognitive discomfort when they enact self-presentations on social media as overlapping self-presentations are inevitable. From a practical perspective, empirical evidence suggests that employees take their interactions on social media seriously and thus dispute managers arguments that interacting on social media is merely a time-pass.

In contemporary organizations, managing workers’ attention is more critical to success than managing workers’ temporal location. Mindfulness, which represents an essential dimension of attention, has been associated with many important individual and work outcomes. However, we know relatively little about how mindfulness is cultivated at the individual level, and the little we know places the individual in full control of cultivating mindfulness; implicitly conceptualizing managers as relatively passive characters in the cultivation of worker mindfulness. Integrating the mindfulness literature with work design, I propose an attention-based model of work design, through which key work characteristics are linked to worker mindfulness through the mediating effects of psychological demands and job-based psychological ownership. I test portions of this model with two samples. In sample 1, I use survey data from 555 employees from a regional healthcare system to examine the relationships between key work characteristics and job-based psychological ownership. In sample 2, I use survey data from 211 individuals to test both the proposed job-based psychological ownership path to mindfulness, as well as the proposed psychological demands path to mindfulness. I end with a discussion of the findings, limitations, and opportunities for future research.