Garima Sharma
Case Western Reserve University More than business or business as usual: Exploring the paradox of hybrid practices
Garima Sharma is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. Garima's research interests are around Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability, especially how organizations integrate often conflicting profit and social/environmental goals. Specifically, she is interested in topics including the business case for CSR, sensemaking of CSR issues, and trajectory of CSR implementation in organizations. Through questions related to these areas she wants to explore the roles of the institutional pressures, internal and external stakeholders and the organizational context in facilitating or inhibiting integration of social/environmental and profit goals. Garima received her Bachelor's in Engineering (equivalent to BS) and Master's in Business Administration (MBA) from India after which she worked as an internal organizational development consultant for a software consulting firm in India.
Garima's research has been presented at numerous conferences such as the Academy of Management Annual Meetings, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Constructing Green Conference at University of Michigan (2010) and Southern Academy of Management (Nov 2011). She has published in the Journal of Change Management and has written several book chapters (MIT Press, Routledge) as well as case studies (Ivey Publishing).
Her teaching interests are around organizational change, research methods, sustainability and human values in organizations. She hopes to use her research in the classroom and encourage future business leaders to adopt a lens of social responsibility and business ethics in the management of organizations.
More than business or business as usual: Exploring the paradox of hybrid practices
This study explores different ways organizations configure their practices to meet demands of multiple institutional logics. It highlights the contextual variables that make one configuration more probable than another. It also elucidates the tension that one configuration may experience more than the other. To do this it compares initiatives from two for-profit organizations from India that address both business and social/environmental logics. Findings indicate that organizations that choose business logic for defining the means to achieve a social/environmental goal will experience less tension than those who hybridize the means at a practice level (holographic) or at an organizational level (ideographic). In other words, the organization which experiences relatively less tension between multiple logics paradoxically employs business logic to define the means for achieving environmental/social goals. Moreover, distance between the identity of the organization and its partners; distance between actors that define the goals and those that define the means; distance between various interest groups; and distance between firm's focus of attention and its partnerships explained why and how these two organizations configured their responses to multiple logics differently. I link these results to the theory of paradox to explain how the lens of differentiation and integration can contribute to the research in institutional complexity.