Hybridity in Practice: Frontline Employees and the Everyday Navigation of Competing Institutional Logics

ABSTRACT Hybrid organizations routinely confront tensions between competing institutional logics, yet we know little about why frontline employees facing similar tensions respond differently over time. Drawing on an inductive case study of Grameen Bank China, this study examines how frontline employees' adherence to social and commercial logics evolves and shapes their responses to institutional complexity. The analysis identifies four response trajectories: tight coupling, decoupling, recoupling, and failed recoupling, and theorizes the mechanisms generating them. Frontline employees typically begin with dual familiarity with competing logics, but this state proves unstable under sustained social‐commercial tensions. Tight coupling emerges through experiential anchoring, whereby successful full‐cycle enactment and witnessed outcomes stabilize identification with the social logic. In its absence, adherence erodes, often before visible decoupling occurs. This study further identifies grounded aura as a peer‐based mechanism supporting recoupling, and a substitution effect through which commercial identification forecloses it. This study advances institutional complexity research by developing a dynamic process model of individual‐level hybridity.