Organizational Identification in Hybrid Organizations

Abstract

Hybrid organizations are governed by multiple, possibly contradictory institutional logics, challenging their members on the clarity of organizational goals and consistency of activities. Here we explore how an organization’s hybridity affects members’ organizational identification. Using institutional and self-affirmation theory, we pose a negative relationship between an individual’s “purism” – being committed to only one of the logics present – and their identification with a hybrid organization. We further argue that this negative effect of purism is mitigated by the individual’s perception of senior managers’ values and beliefs and the individual’s perception of the compatibility of the logics governing the hybrid organization. We test and find support for our hypotheses using multi-source data on 624 scientists at a leading research university. Our study contributes to work on hybrid organizations by proposing self-continuity as the determining mechanism for organizational identification in this context. We also contribute to studies of individual responses to institutional complexity by identifying an important organizational-level outcome of these responses.