When mission is mission-critical - Towards strategic mission management in hybrid organizations

Hybrid organizations are very much driven by, and committed, to their mission. Yet, they seem to struggle with sustainably incorporating different institutional logics. A direct consequence of their hybrid nature is the risk of mission-drift as a fundamental strategic challenge which internally might induce a decrease in organizational identity coherence and externally can lead to a loss of legitimacy in relevant stakeholder groups. Thus, and as a 'preventive antidote', we suggest a regular and systematic mission review as to mitigate such risk for mission drift. Furthermore, and despite the recent focus by scholars on newly founded hybrid organizations, we believe that such mission review is even more critical for mature hybrid organizations. While hybridity has mainly been discussed and explored as a strategic challenge, from a resource-based perspective, it can also be considered a strategic resource. Thus and playing off such perspective, we propose that the systematic review of a mission statement should proactively make use of an organization's hybrid nature. Thus, the review protocol we term 'hybridity tensions positioning protocol' assumes that hybrid organizations in general and social enterprises in particular integrate a commercial and a social welfare logic and that such hybridity is manifest in four domains (performing; organizing; belonging; learning).