Strategic change remains a topic of intense debate: Not only because it is a recurring phenomenon in the lifespan of an organization, but also for its consequential bearing on an organization’s long-term survival. Strategic change, either motivated to stay true to internal advances or necessary in response to external shifts, tend to be of transformational nature and hence risk disrupting the relationship that organizational members have with the organization they identify with. While a growing body of studies have focused on explaining how employees deal with disruptions to their identification and the restoration of it, much less is known as to how these identification disruptions build up in the first place. In our more than three-year ethnographic case study of a multinational engineering company, organizational members finished an initially endorsed strategic change with disrupted identification. The theoretical model developed on the basis of this strategic change points to the centrality of three process characteristics as triggers to identification disruption. More specifically, two identification mechanisms are identified, namely – identification limbo and identification diremption – with identification limbo leading to deidentifying with the organization, and identification diremption causing dis-identification to emerge. In sum, this study provides one perspective as to why employees may be unable to adapt their identification over the course of a strategic change.