Interprofessional teamwork may threaten professional identities and consequently impede collaboration. This is particularly the case in health care, where resilient professional identities and practices contradict. However, our ethnographic study of interprofessional health care teams showed that over time, professionals reduced identity tensions and escaped their professional identity “straitjacket” to extend their professional identity repertoire. Through real-time observations and interviews, we delineated the process of professional identity reconstruction, which has been insufficiently accounted for in interprofessional teams thus far. Drawing upon literature on identity work and identity play, we explicated five phases of identity reconstruction in our identity plasticity model: shattering, shielding, juggling, fusing, and embodying. This highlights the plastic nature of professional identities, in which advanced phases are fueled by a professional’s courage, vulnerability, and flexibility. Our findings contribute to theoretical insights on the plastic nature of identity, extending how professional identities become reconstructed in interprofessional teams. This has valuable implications for practice in highlighting mechanisms that may boost identity reconstruction to augment collaboration.
