Abstract: State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are the backbone of China’s economic development. The “state-owned” nature of these enterprises imbues them with a high degree of institutional dependency, necessitating the maintenance of an ambiguous organizational identity to adapt to the highly uncertain changes in the institutional environment. This paper employs a case study methodology to analyze the identity ambiguity management process of a state-owned enterprise from 2004 to 2021. The study finds that identity ambiguity exists in various states within SOEs, following an evolutionary path from “opacity→means ambiguity→multivocality→boundary ambiguity.” The interaction between managers and organizational members acts as a driving mechanism for the evolution of states of identity ambiguity. The strategies adopted by senior managers include activating fission, selective response, constructing counter-identities, and emotional resonance, whereas the reactions of organizational members encompass self-examination, group differentiation, intra-group segmentation, and emotional identification. Through effective guidance by managers, identity ambiguity plays a positive role in attracting participation in identity discussions, constructing internal negotiation spaces, reasonably limiting the scope of interpretation, and shaping cross-boundary integration characteristics. By adopting an internal perspective to study the process of identity change in state-owned enterprises, this research serves as an effective complement to existing studies that have been conducted from an external legitimacy perspective. It also enriches the research on the positive aspects of identity ambiguity, providing theoretical insights and practical implications for understanding the organizational identity transformation of SOEs and promoting their high-quality development.

Key words: organizational identity ambiguity, top management, internal organizational conflict, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), case study