Sustaining authenticity while enabling adaptation: Discursively navigating strategy-identity tensions over time

Abstract

Over time, environmental pressures may push organizations to engage in strategic actions that diverge from their foundational identity claims. In such circumstances, organizations experience tensions between pressures for authenticity on the one hand, and pressures for adaptiveness on the other. Such pressures are likely to be of particular importance for organizations that have historically laid claim to a strong social mission. Drawing on a longitudinal study of a large cooperative financial services organization, this study examines how leaders discursively navigate strategy-identity tensions when strategic actions appear inconsistent with historically valued identity attributes. We identify three types of discursive practices leaders may engage in to navigate strategy-identity tensions: (i) pacing; (ii) sensegiving; and (iii) revising. In so doing, we show how leaders may work to enable strategic actions that might be perceived as contrary to key organizational identity attributes, with each of the practices serving different and complementary roles. At the same time, we show how successive recalibrations of the grounds for authenticity enacted in practices of pacing, sensegiving and revising can result in claims of organizational distinctiveness that while continued and insistent, could also become increasingly contestable.