Abstract
Organizations increasingly hybridize as a response to external competing demands and expectations. In doing so, they develop more complex and contested hybrid identities. Identity elasticity – an organizations ability to adapt its identity boundaries – is a key aspect of shaping and sustaining such hybrid identities, yet less is known about this process when elasticity is restricted. To understand organizational identity formation under less elastic conditions, we followed a public agency for digital government from inception over 3.5 years. We traced identity unfolding in an organization where opposing organizing principles of Bureaucracy and Openness clashed and there was no opting-out from that hybridity. Our empirically grounded model show how hybrid identity is formed in cases of limited adaptability. This process is characterized by mission complexity, tensions, and externally imposed shifts in resource allocations. Our model provides direct implications for research on hybridity, organizational identity formation and identity (in)elasticity.