Navigating Identity Tensions with Oppositional Collective Identity: A Case of B Corp Organizations

With increasing awareness that tensions between multiple organizational identities can contribute to mission drift and suboptimal performance, we require deeper insight into how organizations navigate these tensions. In an inductive study on B Corp certified for-profit companies, we investigate whether and how organizations draw on an ‘oppositional,’ or ideologically-opposed, collective identity to navigate tensions among their own multiple identities. Our findings uncover three strategies organizations leverage to draw on the oppositional collective identity to navigate these tensions. This study shows how an oppositional collective identity can provide a space for an organization to connect and ground an ideologically-opposed organization-level identity and synergize compatibilities with their other identities. In this way, organizations are able to maintain core claims of their organization-level identities, reframe them in ways that generate stronger complementarities between them, and generate higher fidelity between identities and actions.