Advancing research on project management in hybrid organizations: insights from the social enterprise literature

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to understand the challenges of managing projects in hybrid organizations. The authors explore how organizations with persistent competing institutional logics strive to balance competing priorities, and the authors craft a research agenda to examine the capabilities to manage projects in hybrid organizations.Design/methodology/approachThe authors focus on the social enterprise hybrid organizational form to study how such organizations manage persistent competing social and economic logics. The authors review the project management and social enterprise literature to generate new insights and suggest future research directions for theory development for project management.FindingsThe understanding of the influences of the institutional context on the management of projects is still quite limited. The authors propose that project managers need adaptive capabilities to address how the dual logics, and their corresponding different expectations, can be flexibly combined. The objective is not to reduce the complexity due to the different logics, which is the focus of much of the literature on institutional complexity. Instead, the focus is on how to incorporate dual logics into a successfully blended hybrid organization.Originality/valueThere is a dearth of literature about how projects are successfully managed in hybrid organizations with persistent competing institutional logics, like social enterprises, and important questions remain to be answered. This paper offers new insights on the capabilities required to flexibly combine dual logics that would generally compete and create conflict on projects in hybrid organizations.