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.