McGill U. - Desautels Faculty of Management, Canada
Recent research on hybrid organizations has begun to adopt a dynamic perspective, recognizing that the salience of embedded logics vary over time and that guardrails play an important role in resolving institutional complexity tensions and maintaining a unique institutional order. However, hybrid literature has yet to fully reason with the cases where hybrids repeatedly fail and entirely change form. Drawing on event sequencing and temporality literatures, we theorize how endogenous and exogenous pressures can lead to fundamental changes in the nature of institutional complexity within hybrid organizations over time. Extending the guardrails concept, we develop the concepts of friction events, which erode guardrails and adjust the salience of institutional logics embedded in the organizations, and rupture events, which destroy guardrails and lead to a fundamental realignment in institutional logics. With this approach, we theorize changes in institutional complexity states and develop a model which helps explain shifting patterns amongst hybrid organization logics over time. As a whole, this paper extends emerging literature on guardrails and builds a stronger temporal understanding of hybrid organizations and institutional complexity.
