Managing Organizational Culture in Online Group Mergers

Research in social computing has typically conceptualized community growth as a process through which a group welcomes newcomers individually. However, online communities also grow through formal and informal mergers, where groups of newcomers with shared experiences join in batches. To understand this process, we conducted a six month, comparative ethnography of two mergers of World of Warcraft raid guilds. While one merger led to a single, thriving community, the other led to the dissolution of both pre-merger groups. Analysis of our ethnographic data suggests that differences in managing organizational culture (a concept drawn from organization studies) led the successful and failed cases to diverge. The study contributes to our understanding of why some attempts to integrate members of different communities are more successful than others. We outline several ways that community leaders, researchers, and designers can effectively take organizational culture into account.