Faculty of Management Research Workshop; Joep Cornelissen, Rotterdam School of Management

Rekindling Purpose and Passion: How the Re-Keying of a Hybrid Organizational Identity Sustains Social Enterprise Emergence

Joep Cornelissen, Rotterdam School of Management

Establishing and sustaining a dual, or hybrid, organizational identity is a persistent challenge for many social entrepreneurs. How do social entrepreneurs successfully combine seemingly incompatible missions into a coherent hybrid organizational identity that allows them to grow and sustain the social enterprise over time? Based on an in-depth, longitudinal study of Fairphone, a social enterprise focused on producing and marketing an environmentally and socially “fair” smartphone, we detail the identity-related struggles that the leaders and employees of the enterprise went through as the enterprise developed and grew. With our study, we elaborate how the anchoring of collective processes of sensemaking about the organization’s identity in product and market choices gives rise to mission drift. We subsequently demonstrate how leaders can redress the potentially negative impact of such sensemaking patterns and avoid mission drift by re-keying prior organizational identity definitions and product-market conceptions into a novel hybrid ideal with a dual mission. By unpacking such re-keying processes, we provide new insight into the emergence of hybrid organizational identities and elaborate the crucial organizational identity work that is done by leaders to transition an emerging social enterprise into a sustainable hybrid organization.


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