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God at Work: Managing diverse & contradictory beliefs

18 Feb, 2019


This is part of a series of profiles on faith and work initiatives from various faiths.


  • by Ali Aslan Gümüsay*, Michael Smets and Tim Morris

A new article by Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Michael Smets and Tim Morris has been published at the Academy of Management Journal. It is entitled ‘God at Work’: Engaging central and incompatible institutional logics through elastic hybridity and examines how the first Islamic Bank in Germany maintains unity in diversity by forming what the authors call an elastic hybrid that remains resilient despite contradictory beliefs and values that persist over time.

Unity in Diversity

The authors explain that existing approaches to managing hybridity focus on solutions that are organizational, structural and static. These approaches manage institutional tensions on behalf of employees. Yet, where competing values are incompatible and central to both the organization and the fundamental beliefs of its employees, it is impractical for an organization to prescribe how individuals manage them.

Gümüsay and colleagues outline polysemy and polyphony as mechanisms that dynamically engage conflicting logics through an organizational-individual interplay. Borrowing from paradox theory, they explain how hybrids can empower individuals to fluidly separate and integrate logics when neither structural compartmentalizing nor organizational blending are feasible because management cannot prescribe a specific balance of logics. The result is a state of elastic hybridity, constituted through the recursive, multi-level relationship between polysemy and polyphony. Elastic hybrids maintain unity in diversity. Like the bank, they are capable of institutionally bending without organizationally breaking and thus enable individuals to practice more of their personal convictions at work while still experiencing a sense of shared organizational purpose.

Implications for politics

According to the authors, implications for politics can be read in-between the lines. They argue that populists advocate for homogeneity as it reduces complexity, put people into boxes and separate them. Effectively, they compartmentalize societies. In contrast, heterogeneity is much more challenging, but also more rewarding. Heterogeneity is not just blending: people do not become all the same, but they cope with this diversity – with unity in diversity. Societies become elastic, accommodating, and enriched by plurality. For Ali Aslan Gümüsay, this is one of the fundamental social and societal challenges of our time: “Do we embrace the complexity of humankind or do we attempt to reduce it?”

  • * Dr. Ali Aslan Gümüsay |University of Hamburg | guemuesay.com | tw: @guemuesay

For more discussion, see When organisational purposes conflict: leading with deliberate vagueness, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School.