Identification is a means by which organizational members define the self in relation to the organization (Turner, 1987). Therefore, identification represents the social and psychological bond that binds employees and the organization – a bond that exists even when employees are dispersed. An organization's identity provides members with an answer to the question, "What is the nature of this organization?" Furthermore, by defining the organization, an organization's identity guides members' feelings, beliefs, and behaviors (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. Research on member identification (which refers to the strength of an individual's cognitive attachment to the organization (Dutton, Dukerich & Harquail, 1994)) suggests that strength of identification determines some critical beliefs and behaviors. Among these are employees' feelings of interpersonal trust, goal-setting processes, internalization of organizational norms and practices, the desire to remain in the organization, and the willingness to cooperate with others (see, for example, Dutton et al., 1994; Kramer, 1993). Identification defines the norms and conventions that individuals use to coordinate their behavior and creates opportunities for organizational learning by creating convergent expectations among organizational members (Kogut & Zander, 1996). Identification may be essential to sustaining virtual organizations because it facilitates critical organizational functions that pose a particular challenge in virtual contexts, such as: coordination and control of dispersed organizational actors; functioning of working groups; encouragement of extra-role helping behaviors; loyalty of valuable employees. The importance of organizational identification in addressing the challenges of virtual organizations can be best illustrated through the use of an example. Consider a challenge that arises in the virtual context: the difficulty in maintaining coordination and control when employees are dispersed. Coordination and control are essential to organizational efficiency and effectiveness because the productivity of organizational members depends on their ability to form reliable expectations about the behavior of others and to rely on others to perform their assigned functions in a consistent and timely manner. Many virtual workers (such as salespeople) must act as representatives or emissaries of the organization. In such cases, it is critical to an organization's competitive position that diverse virtual employees represent the organization consistently. Achieving coordination and control is increasingly difficult as more members of the organization are expected to perform functions that are not fully predictable, not easily measurable, and which require high levels of interaction with others, all of which can complicate coordination. workers' ability to perform virtually (e.g., DeSanctis, 1984). To achieve coordination and control, traditional organizations rely on various means of performance monitoring such as direct supervision and the enforcement of rules and procedures. However, traditional means of coordination and control can be ineffective and even dysfunctional when employees are dispersed across a variety of workplaces (Blake & Suprenant, 1990). For example, direct supervision is generally a costly means of ensuring coordination and control. The fact that supervisors and subordinates are not co-located in a virtual environment means that they areEven greater time and investment in technology is needed to facilitate performance monitoring. As a result, supervision may be more costly and less likely to be effective in a virtual setting (a fact that may contribute to previous research findings indicating that supervisors have less positive attitudes toward telecommuting than lower-level workers ( DeSanctis, 1984; Duxbury, Higgins and Irving, 1987)).When employees are dispersed, it is also more difficult to enforce organizational rules and adherence to standard procedures. Because the virtual context complicates efforts to externally control employees, research suggests that virtual organizations should replace external controls with internal controls such as trust, employee motivation, and convergence of individual and organizational goals (e.g., Blake & Suprenant, 1990; DeSanctis, 1983; Lucas & Baroudi, 1994). Organizational identification, which provides a psychological bond between workers and the organization, facilitates coordination because it leads to convergent expectations (Kogut & Zander, 1996). Identification motivates members to coordinate their efforts to achieve organizational goals by enhancing interpersonal trust and cooperation (Brewer, 1981; Kramer & Brewer, 1984, 1986). Furthermore, research suggests that members who identify strongly with the organization are more likely to accept organizational goals. as personal goals, they are more likely to pursue superordinate goals and are more likely to be loyal and obedient (Dutton, et al., 1994). Organizational identification is expected to be related to work commitment, willingness to perform extra-role behaviors, and task performance (Dutton et al., 1994). Thus, through its impact on employee motivations, organizational identification facilitates coordination and control without the need for costly (and perhaps ineffective) supervisory and monitoring systems. In summary, we argue that organizational identification can help organizations address some of the most critical challenges of the virtual work context, such as ensuring coordination and control. Organizational identification accomplishes these feats through its influence on employee expectations, motivations, and subsequent behaviors. Therefore, we suggest that organizational identification may be a particularly effective and efficient means through which a virtual organization can achieve its goals and ensure performance. These arguments provide evidence for the utility of organizational identification among virtual employees. What remains unclear is how identification can be strengthened in a virtual context, particularly because the traditional means by which members' identification is created and sustained (e.g., shared clothing, architecture, and other artifacts) may not be available to virtual workers. Therefore, virtual organizations may find themselves in a “catch-22” situation: on the one hand, maintaining organizational identification of virtual employees is particularly critical because it helps organizations address challenges related to managing dispersed employees (i.e., obstacles to coordination and control). On the other hand, virtual employees are less likely to be exposed to organizational factors that have traditionally strengthened member identification. Therefore, it is important to identify the factors that create and sustain virtual employee identification, recognizing that the determinants of identification may differ from those of non-virtual employees. Organizational communication and identification. The researchconcerning the effects of communication on individuals' attitudes toward the organization (e.g., Huff, Sproull & Kiesler, 1989; Sproull & Kiesler, 1986) provides a theoretical link between communication and organizational identification. Specifically, research has found that communication can influence employee attitudes which can be strongly related to organizational identification. First, communication can strengthen member identification because it provides organizational members with the opportunity to create and share their subjective perceptions of the organization's defining characteristics: its norms. , values ​​and culture. Knowledge of these aspects of the organization creates a sense of shared meaning among employees. Communication helps create shared meanings because it provides insights into social context (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991), which leads to the perception of social presence (Fulk & Boyd, 1991), and creates a shared interpretive context among organizational members (e.g., Zack, 1993). Shared meaning provides organizational members with a clear sense of the organization's identity and thus can strengthen members' identification. A complementary way in which communication strengthens employees' organizational identification is by providing workers with a feeling of ownership in the shared meaning that has been created because they feel they helped develop it. In support of this argument, research suggests that the frequency with which individuals communicate with others in the organization improves organizational commitment because frequent communication leads individuals to feel like active participants in the organization (Huff et al., 1989) . This sense of active participation can lead employees to feel that they have greater control over the organization (Huff et al., 1989). Furthermore, the public act of participating without being forced to do so can lead individuals to feel more positively about the organization and, therefore, to identify with the organization more strongly (e.g., Huff et al., 1989 ; Kiesler, 1971; O'Reilly & Caldwell, 1981). Properties of communication media and their effect on organizational identification In exploring the link between communication and organizational identification, it is important to note that the virtual status of individuals (i.e. the degree to which they operate from traditional offices or dispersed locations) leads them to use different means of communication. For example, face-to-face communication is an important means available to employees working in traditional offices. For those working virtually, however, face-to-face communication with organizational members is less likely. Instead, virtual workers must rely on email and the phone as a means of necessity. Early research investigating the effects of alternative communication media on organizational members was guided by information richness theory (e.g., Daft, Lengel & Trevino, 1987). This perspective implicitly assumes that communication media intrinsically possess characteristics that make them more or less effective on various dimensions (Fulk, Steinfield, Schmitz, & Power, 1987). For example, face-to-face communication tends to transmit signals from the social context very strongly (Sproull & Kiesler, 1986; 1991), and has proven particularly effective in creating social presence (Fulk & Boyd, 1991) and shared interpretative. context among organizational members (e.g., Zack, 1993). In contrast, email and telephone communication are not as rich as face-to-face communication in their ability to convey social context cues (e.g., Sproull &).