The Choices We Collectively Make: Orchestrating Hybridity to Tackle Grand Challenges

Abstract

Hybrid organizing offers new ways to address grand challenges by balancing profit and sustainability. However, current research on hybridity focuses mainly on individual organizations, while grand challenges involve complex networks of interconnected yet independent actors. This paper introduces a new perspective on hybridity showing how single organizations engage others to enable collective solutions. Through the lens of orchestration, we uncover the role of three Latin American stock exchanges in driving collective hybridity in a qualitative process study. Our multi-level model reveals the sequential activities of an orchestrator – catalysing, brokering, and building – and a process of collective tension management. We extend theory on how organizations can engage an entire ecosystem to adopt hybridity and how hybrid organizing can drive large-scale solutions to grand challenges.