Julie Battilana: Round hole, square peg? Sustaining the joint pursuit of social and commercial goals in a cooperative bank

Résumé/Abstract

We examine how hybrid organizations can make decisions that can simultaneously meet both social and commercial demands to sustain their dual social and commercial goals. To do so, we conduct a longitudinal, inductive study of a European cooperative bank over eight years. Our study first reveals a highly iterative decision-making process in which every proposal subject to decision was heavily negotiated and modified, until the proposal satisfactorily met both social and commercial demands. Second, our study unpacks the mechanism of dual championing, according to which decision-makers were respectively socialized into roles of champions of either the social or commercial goals for which they acted as guardians, and which dictated distinct priorities and behaviors in the decision-making process. Collectively, these champions ensured that all proposals adopted fit both organizational objectives; proposals that did not were rejected. Third, our study stresses the importance of updating the decision-making scope in hybrid organizations as they evolve over time in order to avoid the risk of mission drift. Taken together, our findings advance research on how organizations can pursue multiple goals over time.

Author’s bio

Julie Battilana is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School and the Alan L. Gleitsman Professor of Social Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, where she is also the founder and academic co-director of the Social Innovation and Change Initiative. Professor Battilana’s research focuses on social change and hybrid organizations that pursue a social mission while engaging in commercial activities to sustain their operations. She has articles published in the Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Leadership Quarterly, Management Science, Organization, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Research in Organizational Behavior, and Strategic Organization. Her research has been featured in publications like Businessweek, Forbes, Huffington Post, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. She was also previously a regular contributor to the French newspaper Le Monde.