How to Manage Organizational Identity Ambiguity in State-owned Enterprises?—A Longitudinal Case Study Based on Nanxing
State-owned enterprises(SOEs)are the backbone of China's economic development.The"state-owned"nature of these en-terprises imbues them with a high degree of institutional dependency,necessitating the maintenance of an ambiguous organizational iden-tity to adapt to the highly uncertain changes in the institutional environment.This paper employs a case study methodology to analyze the identity ambiguity management process of a state-owned enterprise from 2004 to 2021.The study finds that identity ambiguity exists in va-rious states within SOEs,following an evolutionary path from"opacity→means ambiguity→multivocality→boundary ambiguity."The in-teraction between managers and organizational members acts as a driving mechanism for the evolution of states of identity ambiguity.The strategies adopted by senior managers include activating fission,selective response,constructing counter-identities,and emotional reso-nance,whereas the reactions of organizational members encompass self-examination,group differentiation,intra-group segmentation,and emotional identification.Through effective guidance by managers,identity ambiguity plays a positive role in attracting participation in identity discussions,constructing internal negotiation spaces,reasonably limiting the scope of interpretation,and shaping cross-boundary integration characteristics.By adopting an internal perspective to study the process of identity change in state-owned enterprises,this re-search serves as an effective complement to existing studies that have been conducted from an external legitimacy perspective.It also enri-ches the research on the positive aspects of identity ambiguity,providing theoretical insights and practical implications for understanding the organizational identity transformation of SOEs and promoting their high-quality development.
organizational identity ambiguitytop managementinternal organizational conflictstate-owned enterprises(SOEs)case study
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