This dissertation explores how hybridity tensions arising from multiple institutional logics are reflected in legitimacy challenges in religious hybrid organizations and how these challenges are managed. Hybrid organizations combine multiple institutional logics that often generate competing expectations, organizational tensions, and legitimacy challenges. Although research has increasingly examined hybridity, institutional logics, and organizational legitimacy, comparatively less is known about how these tensions are reflected in legitimacy challenges in religious hybrid organizations. Addressing this gap, the dissertation adopts an interpretive qualitative case study of two monasteries within the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, drawing on interviews, focus group discussions, observations, and documents.

The findings demonstrate that legitimacy challenges emerge through the judgments of internal and external stakeholders and are audience-differentiated. Internal and external legitimacy challenges are interdependent yet asymmetrical, sharing common evaluative foundations while differing in emphasis and consequences. Stakeholders’ evaluations converge around three legitimacy bases: accountability to God, collective agency, and liability of newness of hybridity, which explain how and why hybridity is accepted, questioned, or rejected along a continuum. The findings further identify two overarching legitimacy management strategies: a two-stage process of sensemaking and sensegiving of hybridity, and persevering with the goals of hybridity.

Overall, the dissertation advances a judgment-based understanding of legitimacy under multi-logic hybridity by demonstrating that legitimacy emerges through stakeholders’ evaluations of tensions among religion, commercial, and social welfare logics. By increasing our understanding of how legitimacy challenges emerge, are structured and managed in religious hybrid organizations operating under multiple institutional logics, the dissertation contributes to hybrid orgnaization, institutional logics and organizational legitimacy.