Understanding Decision-Making in Hybrid Social SMEs through Sensemaking

Sammanfattning

This study explores how decision-making unfolds within a hybrid social small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) when examined through a sensemaking perspective. While existing research often conceptualizes decision-making as a rational or bounded process of selecting among predefined alternatives, such approaches remain limited in capturing hybrid organizational contexts where social and commercial objectives coexist and evolve. Addressing this gap, the study adopts an interpretivist approach and conceptualizes decision-making as an ongoing, socially constructed process shaped through meaning-making, interaction, and action. Empirically, the study is based on a qualitative single-case design focusing on Organization “X”, a hybrid social SME operating in Nigeria. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with organizational members, supported by organizational documents, the study examines how a strategic decision-making process unfolded during the transition from a conference-based model to project implementation. Using an abductive approach, the analysis interprets how participants make sense of this transition, with sensemaking serving as the interpretive lens and decision-making as the phenomenon under study. The findings show that decision-making does not occur as a discrete event, but emerges gradually through accumulated experiences, interactions, and practical engagement. Contrary to dominant assumptions in the literature, the study finds that sensemaking may unfold under conditions of alignment and opportunity, rather than only ambiguity and conflict. While social–commercial tensions were less prominent than suggested in existing literature about hybrid organizations, they were not experienced as fundamentally opposing logics, but were actively managed and held latent through mechanisms such as reframing, identity anchoring, deferral, and leadership communication. In this process, leadership communication emerged as a higher-order sensegiving mechanism that enables alignment while containing potential tensions. The study contributes to research in three ways. First, it extends sensemaking theory by demonstrating that meaning-making processes can be driven by opportunity and alignment, not solely disruption. Second, it refines the hybridity literature by showing that tensions in hybrid organizations may be actively managed through interpretive processes rather than resolved. Third, it identifies leadership communication as a key mechanism through which shared meaning and organizational coherence are sustained. Overall, the study offers a processual and practice-based understanding of decision-making in hybrid social SMEs, highlighting how organizational actors continuously construct, negotiate, and stabilize meaning in response to evolving social and commercial demands.