Résumé

Hybrid organizations – those combining normative and utilitarian identities – are both empirically proliferating and academically under close scrutiny. One central area of research constitutes the ability to combine these conflicting identities strategically to obtain a sustainable competitive advantage. To understand how hybrid organizations manage their strategy formation and implementation process, we conducted an in-depth, longitudinal case study of a content management systems (CMS) company that embraces a commercial-open source identity. Research thus far implicitly terms the strategic and operational tensions that hybrid organizations face as internal. Yet, our study provides original insights into a hybrid organizations that embraces two identities, where one identity is symbiotically tied to, and can only be validated by an external entity, the open source community. Further, following the fifteen year trajectory of the hybrid organization provides one of the first process models of how organizations actively pursue divergent strategies through identity (re)interpretation over time. Herewith we contribute to the recurring calls for advancing our understanding beyond static single event resolutions towards dynamic process accounts. Finally, the process model we develop shows how organizations are able to dynamically balance hybrid identities by exploiting the benefits of their interdependence, while maintaining partial distinction between them. In doing so, we contribute to present research that suggest managing hybrid identities as either idiographic or holographic, with a new form, which we term heterographic. Overall, our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how organizations successfully manage the nexus of identity and strategy when embracing hybridity.

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