Advancing research on project management in hybrid organizations: insights from the social enterprise literature
International Journal of Managing Projects in Business
ISSN: 1753-8378
Article publication date: 6 April 2023
Issue publication date: 9 May 2023
Abstract
Purpose
This 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/approach
The 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.
Findings
The 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/value
There 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.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The work summarized in this journal article is supported by the Project Management Institute's Sponsored Research Program. The authors also thank Penny Fillier-Skinner for her research assistance.
Citation
Jewer, J., Jugdev, K. and Amini, M.F. (2023), "Advancing research on project management in hybrid organizations: insights from the social enterprise literature", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 429-447. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-08-2022-0185
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited