The Way We Were: Legacy Organizational Identity and the Role of Leadership

Abstract

We theorize how an organization's identity may endure as a legacy beyond the existence of the originating organization. We define legacy organizational identity as the shared claim by former organizational members to 'who we were as an organization', that (1) explicitly draws central and valued organizational identity elements from the past into the present and (2) is enacted regularly through collectively shared activities and artifacts. We conceptualize how legacy identities arise from organizational processes and events, such as death, decline, retrenchment or restructuring, that profoundly change the firm's existence as a recognizable entity. We compare organizational identities that are 'living' (in ongoing firms) and legacies (in defunct firms) and then show how leadership perpetuates a legacy through sensebreaking (from the past form) and sensegiving (for the present and future). We use the case of Digital Equipment Corporation to illustrate our theoretical ideas.