Understanding Employees’ Perspectives on Organizational Identity Change from Their LinkedIn Accounts,

Organizational identity is a dynamic concept, as it changes over time. Recent research has highlighted that globalization and the expansion of social media in the past decade have re-invigorated discussions of organizational change and organizational identity change. Social media are strongly integrated into social and economic life, and have become an emerging topic in many disciplines. However, they have not been studied much in relation to organizational identity change. Thus, it is still unknown whether and how they can be used for measuring organizational identity change. To address this gap this paper aims to explore how social media (specifically, LinkedIn) can be used to understand and measure internal organizational members’ perceptions of organizational identity change and how these internal members reflect this change in their own LinkedIn accounts. The Research Case Company is Italian, with more than 10 international branches. It was chosen as a research setting because it has recently changed its name to give renewed emphasis to who they are and what they do. The research follows an empirical case study approach. Data was manually collected from employees’ public LinkedIn profiles and analyzed using linear regression. This research is part of broader doctoral research focusing on organizational identity change in the Research Case Company, where it also aims to help the Research Case Company to develop and implement organizational values