IDENTITY CHANGE AND STABILITY IN ORGANIZATIONAL GROUPS: A LONGITUDINAL INVESTIGATION

Abstract

Research on identity in organizations takes endurance overtime as a taken‐for‐granted expectation, but then often explores how identity changes. Conversely, research on memory in organizations takes change as a taken‐for‐granted expectation and then explores how particular memories might be maintained by purposeful action. We used both of these literatures as a basis for exploring what happened to two aspects of an organizational group's identity over the course of its first seven years. One aspect of identity centered on the group's mission and the other on the group's internal processes. Based on analysis of the processes involved in the evolution of the group's identity, we suggest several factors that foster stability in identity and several factors that foster change in identity. From the identification of these factors, and based on Lewin's Field Theory approach, we suggest a more complex depiction of what identity stability or change might mean overtime.