Njoke Khalifa Thomas

Bio

Dr. Njoke Khalifa Thomas is an organizational theorist whose research explores how individuals construct professional identities, navigate relational expectations, and manage the embodied experience of work. As a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wharton School, she worked with Dr. Nancy Rothbard to investigate how organizational contexts shape identity development and emotional labor, particularly in high-intensity occupations.

Her dissertation, completed at Case Western Reserve University, examined how medical students internalize, question, and negotiate their developing roles as physicians during clinical training. Since then, her research has expanded to consider how caring interactions at work can buffer against the physical and emotional depletion caused by performance pressures. She also studies emerging occupations—such as digital content creation—that blur the lines between virtual presence and physical performance.

Dr. Thomas is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Organization at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, where she teaches and conducts research on workplace identity, institutions, and the relational foundations of professional well-being. Her work has been published in Academy of Management Review and Journal of Management Inquiry and continues to inform both scholarly theory and practice-oriented interventions in organizational development, health professions education, and interprofessional collaboration.