Despite a general call for the critical rethinking of management and organizations knowledge using postcolonial lenses, the literature on work identities has been evolving with poor connection with critical approaches that counter the “Western-centric” character of our field of inquiry and allow for the peculiarities of the Global South to be brought to the fore. Hence, this paper aims to answer how to offer a postcolonial critique of management and organizational knowledge on work identity by scrutinizing the obscure theoretical interplay between subjectivity and identity. To do so, it articulates the postcolonial constructs of hybridity, mimicry and liminality so as to fill four ontological gaps identified in the way work identity has been framed in the extant scholarship: as (1) a duality between subjectivity and social identity; (2) an external entity one must comply with; (3) an interchangeable phenomenon; (4) a juxtaposing phenomenon. Its contribution lies in proposing the study of identities and subjectivities as hybrid encounters. This is to be fulfilled in three ways. First, by exploring mimicry between the two constructs in the form of agency and control, sameness and alterity, and stability and change. Second, by acknowledging how to differently operationalize discursive practices so as they reflect either subjectivities or identities in field data collection. Third, using researchers’ own subjectivities and identities to create a ‘liminal space’ with which to engage with participants’ hybrid encounters.