Identification in Face-to-Face, Hybrid, and Pure Virtual Teams: Untangling the Contradictions

Identification is a person's sense of belonging with a social category. Identification in virtual organizational teams is thought to be especially desirable because it provides the glue that can promote group cohesion despite the relative lack of face-to-face interaction. Though research on virtual teams is exploding, it has not systematically identified the antecedents or moderators of the process by which identification develops, leaving a number of gaps and apparent contradictions. The purpose of this paper is to begin to untangle the contradictions and address some of the gaps by tracing the mechanisms and moderating processes through which identification develops in hybrid and pure virtual settings, and the ways that these processes differ from face-to-face settings.