Can Convincing Strategies Transcend Conflicts? A Study of Competing Institutional Logics

We extend theories of competing institutional logics to include convincing as a new conflict management strategy in hybrid organisations. Relying on longitudinal data of a hybrid organisation of the sharing economy, we find that decoupling, compromising, and combining, while explicitly or implicitly accepting the underlying disagreement, all aggravate most conflict intensities – weak, medium, and strong – while compromising and combining only temporally reconcile strong and weak conflicts, respectively. Convincing strategies, in contrast, view the goals and practices of competing logics as interdependent and deliberately use these interdependencies to transcend – i.e., to go beyond the perceived limits of – a given conflict. We find four mechanisms that facilitate transcend-ing, including (i) developing novel persuasive arguments as to why given practices can promote another logic’s goal, (ii) suggesting a new distinction previously unappreciated that separates controversial from uncontroversial practices, (iii) proposing a novel overarching goal agreeable to a competing logic and (iv) providing an “enabling environment” for open discussions about goal-practice interdependencies. We posit that these mechanisms provide opportunities for competing logics to overcome conflicts and, thus, can make hybrid organisations more enduring, innovative, and sustainable.