Is a Shift Always a Drift? Governing Hybrid Organizations with Innovative Purpose

Jérémy Lévêque (), Kevin Levillain () and Blanche Segrestin ()
Additional contact information
Jérémy Lévêque: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Kevin Levillain: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Blanche Segrestin: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Hybrid organizations are often confronted with the risk of mission drift, when the social purpose is somehow lost by the evolution of activities and the practices become decouple from the formal purpose. But if the purpose is innovative, tensions appear between the need to develop learning processes through innovations and the risks of losing the social purpose. The article aims at characterizing what are the potential shifts in an organization with an innovative purpose, and whether they constitute a mission drift or not. It is based on a longitudinal case study with a French hybrid organization with an innovative purpose in vocational training. Based on this empirical study, we first confirm that the innovative purpose leads to shifts in activities that are not necessarily mission drifts. We then show that the shifts can be classified in two main categories: those where learning creates a dissension on the interpretation of the organization's purpose, which we call "coverage shift", and those where exploration threatens the commonly accepted interpretation of a purpose, which we call "reinvention shift". These two different situations create differentiated risks regarding mission drift, and therefore call for differentiated response at the governance level. This study thus contributes to enriching the literature on the mission drift in hybrid organizations. It also suggests some avenues how to deviation control can be complemented by a capacity to assess the innovative shifts consistent with the purpose.

Keywords: Mission-driven companies; Mission drift; Hybrid organizations; Innovative purpose (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-06-26
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01982969v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in EURAM 2019 - Exploring the Future of Management: Facts, Fashion and Fado, Jun 2019, Lisbonne, Portugal

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-01982969v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01982969

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().