Organizational Identity Formation Under Hybridity Unawareness and Inelasticity

The formation of organizational identity for new types of government agencies are especially challenging due to their institutional context. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal data from the first 2.5 years of an agency for digital government, we induce an empirically grounded model of how organizational identity is formed when hybridity is pre-defined and inelastic due to strict institutional boundaries. In this process study, our findings run counter to prevailing models of organizational identity formation who proposes a convergent process of dual logics, that through the enactment of practice experimentation end up with a blended identity. Instead, we found an organization that was assigned hybridity from the start by mission duality, with no way to escape the tension it brought with it due to the inelasticity provided by the institutional context. Our findings showed a divergent process emerging from an initial unawareness of hybridity and ending with structural separation. Our theoretical model of organizational identity formation in unaware hybrids has a number of direct implications for ongoing research on elasticity in hybrid organizations and organizational identity formation.