Organizational Policy Complexity in Hybrid Organizations: Evidence from Scandinavian State-Owned Enterprises

The state and its organizations have grown more complex in recent decades. Because this may pose substantial challenges to public governance, it is essential to advance our understanding of the conditions influencing the complexities in modern organizations. Therefore, we study organizational policy complexity in relation to dimensions of publicness in hybrid organizations. Specifically, we focus on one type of hybrid organization, namely state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and one type of policy, namely privacy policies. Our general expectation is that organizations with a lower degree of publicness will tend to have more complex policies. However, our analysis reveals a complicated picture: both business-like SOEs and larger state ownership shares are linked to higher levels of policy complexity. These organizations embed a range of policy elements to align with diverse normative expectations and navigate complex institutional environments with both state and market norms.