Hybrid organizations (ex: social enterprises) are in perpetual tension between social and commercial logics. Battilana and Dorado (2010) suggest that a homogeneous organizational identity decreases those tensions and identity conflicts. Our study shows that integrating a performance measurement system tends to decrease those tensions and identity conflicts. From practice theory (Ahrens, Chapman, 2006), we conducted an in-depth qualitative case study of the social integration enterprise ARES, analyzing the implementation of a performance measurement system, from 1991 to 2013. Our results show that the decrease of public financial aids constrain hybrid organizations to import progressively more traditional management tools. This standardization of performance measurement systems (dashboards, indicators, and an adapted division of tasks), allows ARES employees to reach their objectives of social integration while decreasing their identity conflicts. This thesis contributes, on the one hand, to better comprehension of this process of homogeneous organizational identity in hybrid organizations. On the other hand, this research contributes to the domain of management control, by showing how hybrid logics allow for improved alignment between strategy and performance measurement systems.
The role of performance measurement system in identity conflicts in hybrid organizations: The case of the social integration enterprise ARES.