From Pirates to Professionals: Retaining a Sense of Integration During Venture Scaling

Abstract

Our paper explains how organizations can build and sustain internal member identification during rapidly scaling transitions. Using a longitudinal case study of a UK scaling firm, we show how organizational members follow a recursive process of retaining and forgoing the past and foreseeing the future to create a transitional organizational identity through transitionary identity work. Key to such identity work is identification-based trust, which embraces being valued, having confidence in colleagues and being aligned with company values. Such identification-based trust generates positive emotions and holds a scaling firm together while it changes. Our study contributes to the literature on identity transition, showing how integration can be achieved in underexplored settings of chaotic and unstable change.