Advancing research on hybrid organizations : insights from the management practices of a large firm diversified into multiple digitally enabled businesses.

The advances in information technology have dramatically augmented the reach, flexibility, and agility of modern enterprises. In the past years, many large companies rapidly expanded their business scopes and spanned their organizational boundaries, diversifying into various digitally enabled businesses. These firms may achieve organizational innovations and business opportunities through the integration of digital products and services in different fields. We argue that this new form of organizations be the next breed of organizations and their integration efforts pose certain intraorganizational level “organizing” challenges that have not yet covered sufficiently in the literature: How to design organizational activities, structures, and processes to support such integration. This dissertation adopts the hybrid organizing perspective to explore the intraorganizational level mechanisms that explain how large firms diversified into multiple digitally enabled businesses achieve integration. To do so, a case study of LeEco, an internet and technology giant in China, is conducted. This dissertation makes two important contributions. First, this dissertation advances understanding of hybrids by demonstrating how hybrids embedded in a more complex pluralistic institutional environment achieve integration at the intraorganizational level. It also contributes to knowledge of hybrids by identifying the generative aspects of the combination of multiple elements. Second, utilizing hybrid organizing as a sensitizing device to unearth the intraorganizational level mechanisms that explain how a big firm diversified into multiple digitally enabled businesses achieve integration at the intraorganizational level, this dissertation contributes back to hybrid organizing by identifying several internal links between the four internal-oriented dimensions of hybrid organizing.