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The Effect of Virtual Team Membership Change on Social Identity Development: A Case from Higher Education in Norway

This research attempts to address the question, what factors may influence the perceptions and development of a group social identity on a new virtual team? Of particular interest are prior experiences with virtual team environments, experience with virtual team technology, and other organizational and contextual factors that may be relevant. This research makes use of a natural field experiment and qualitative study on two university colleges that make use of virtual teams and communication. One university college had previously undergone a merger while the other had not. The findings indicate that the previous merger for the one university college still plays a part in how much the employees feel like one unit and perceive their performance and conflict. There is a need to focus on training of virtual team members to ensure appropriate utilization of the technology to enable social identity development.