How to overcome the double penalty? Identity work in female artistic entrepreneurial ensembles

Identity work in organizations is a main concern on research focuses. However, little is known about how artists ensemble in organizational creation manages identity work. The organizational creation in music ensemble is relative to entrepreneurial process. Our aims are to explore how to balance multiple individual and plural identities to shape the organizational one in creation of musical female ensembles and also to understand the role of the support of consultancy musical specialist in the process. We led an emic approach research design. Following the advice of Brown (2017) we examine identity work composition trough five multiple complementary approaches': discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio-cognitive, and psycho-dynamic. The data used comprised numerous sources: primary data from in deep interviews and observation of support's session of people of the ensemble. We follow two ensembles' creations during the exchange with the consultancy support training to double level of identity work. The first level help to understand how the multiple identity deals thanks four actions: competition, coexistence, integration, helicoidal (inferential process) of identities. After this individual identity work, comes the analyze of the second level, organizational one. This level of identity work helps to understand what kind of the first level identity work is manage to balance the influence of each musician identity, and how the consultant could be identity mediator to stabilized organizational identity. Our research enlightens: 1) the balance between each individual artist multiple identities to shape the organizational identity through identity work; 2) the place of the music consultant in the roles' tensions regulation to adjust the identities and the identity work going to organizational identity. 3) Our research finally cross-fertilizes literatures about artistic entrepreneurial, female gender and organizational identity work.