Integrator or Gremlin? Identity Partnerships and Team Newcomer Socialization

When newcomers enter teams, they seek out identity resources from team incumbents to help their socialization. In turn, team incumbents offer identity resources to newcomers to support incumbents’ existing held team identities. Based on theories of identity and socialization, we make a case for the identity partnership, a relationship in which identity resources are exchanged between an incumbent team member and a team newcomer. We first explore the identity needs of both team newcomers and team incumbents and how such needs drive proactivity. We then examine the initial selection of possible others for identity partnerships and the evaluation of initial exchanges between parties once initial selections have been made. Finally, we discuss partnership formation and shared identification as dyadic outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of how the dyadic identity partnership relationalizes our understanding of newcomer socialization.