Understanding processes of organizational self in managing multiple identities

Abstract

Organizational identity is observed to direct organizational change in response to changing external contexts Dutton and Dukerich 1991 Albert et al 2000 As organizations are increasingly responding to dynamic stakeholder demands it is becoming imperative for them to adopt hybrid or multiple identities Pratt and Foreman 2000 Glynn 2008 It is interesting to know how organizations manage these multiple identities while still being true to its original holistic conception of 8216 who we are 8217 I set sail on this doctoral journey with this question in my mind Pratt and Kraatz 2009 introduced the concept of 8216 organizational self 8217 in response to this debate about 8216 single internal identity versus multiple externally ascribed identities 8217 According to them 8216 organizational self 8217 can be thought of as an entity that unites and prioritizes between the multiple identities The objective of this dissertation is to understand processes by which this sense of collective organizational self is formed to manage multiple identities I have been fortunate to gain access to an organization which has multiple subsidiaries and which is trying to align them with a sense of commonness I chose the multiple case study method to compare between these multiple subsidiaries and their identities newline newline