Meetings at Digital Workplaces – An Experimental Approach to Analyze Group Attachment and Organizational Commitment in Digital Worlds

After facing the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations request their employees to work from home permanently. For an organization, this provides positive benefits such as reducing costs for rent. From an employee perspective, working from home can cause a feeling of isolation towards co-workers and lower attachment to an organization. One way to counteract this problem is to transfer the office to the digital world, especially spurred by the metaverse discussion to represent processes of our real world in digital environments that allow us to do everything in the same way digitally as we are doing in the real world. In this paper, we present a theoretical model for conducting a 2x2 between-subject experiment to analyze how digital real-world meeting experiences influence team attachment and organizational commitment. We contribute to theories such as the need of belonging and transfer them to digital environments and provide practical implications for designing digital offices.