دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تغییر سازمانی و سخت گیری در حین بحران - الزویر 2017

abstract

When and how do existential crises, threatening business continuity, stimulate organizational change or cause the oppositedrigid preservation of established business practices? This question remains unresolved, despite three decades of deliberations in the academic literature, which still yields contradicting theoretical arguments and empirical results. One view argues and finds support for the hypothesis that posits an amplified propensity to change within threatened organizations. The other view supports the threat-rigidity thesis, implying reinforcing habitual practices. In this paper, we provide a novel holistic typology of organizational crises and then review the literature on the topic, summarizing existing insights within a theoretical framework comprising three interrelated sequential processes: organizational cognition, decision-making, and implementation. We analyze the gaps in the field's knowledge within each process and propose a research agenda to address these voids.

5. Implications and conclusions

5.1. A way ahead: the implications for the future research

This paper concentrates on answering the question about when and how existential crises stimulate organizational change or its oppositedrigid preservation of established business practices. In recognition of the fact that crisis events are not homogenous, we first develop a holistic typology of organizational crises (Fig. 1) along the dimensions of “the origin of crisis” and “the temporal perspective.” The primary perceived origin of the crisis is described along technological/economic versus human/social dichotomy, while the temporal dimension captures events provoked by extreme or deviant causes (“cataclysm”) versus processual crises, whose latent causes have existed for a while later culminating into crisis proportions. The complex phenomenon of organizational response to a crisis is then analyzed through the lens of three pathways representing interrelated processes of organizational cognition, decision-making and implementation (Fig. 2). Our analyses opens the way for future research to build upon this framework. We further reveal the gaps in the field's knowledge and propose a research agenda to address these voids.

Explicitly choosing the appropriate process and level for analysisdorganizational cognition, organizational decision-making, individual decision-making, or decision implementationdis of paramount importance for further studies. Researchers must pay attention to the theoretical level they analyze and not mix different levels in one model (e.g., slack resources with individual interpretation processes), except in cases of multilevel modeling.