Abstract
This developmental paper reports a work in progress study. It aims at investigating microand macro-level processes related to doctors’ professional/religious identity conflict in critical situations, such as End-of-Life (EoL) circumstances, and the consequences of such conflict on doctors’ psychological well-being (PWB). It achieves this by testing in a multilevel, moderated mediation analysis four hypotheses in a two-wave study of doctors working in 30 NHS Trusts in England. By providing a holistic framework on identity conflict dynamics (its emergence, unfolding and individual consequences), this developmental paper has the potential to make two key contributions to the literature on identity and identity conflict as experienced by doctors in EoL circumstance. First, it clarifies micro-level conditions and mechanisms of professional/religious identity conflict in doctors and its impact on PWB. Second, by including ‘extra-individual’ forces as macro-level boundary conditions, namely organisational ethical climate, it extends identity theories with social information processing theory.