A Process Perspective on Organizational Failure: A Qualitative Meta‐Analysis

By S. Habersang, Jill A. Küberling-Jost, Markus Reihlen, Christoph Seckler. Journal of Management Studies, 2017

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An important stream of the organizational failure literature has proposed process models to describe how firms fail. Despite much progress, this stream is currently at a crossroads. Previous process models try to capture how failure unfolds in singular models that describe organizational failure as the result of either inertia or extremism or as a mixture of both. However, it remains unclear how these competing explanations are related and what underlying mechanisms explain why organizational failure processes unfold as they do. We address these issues by examining failure processes using a qualitative meta‐analysis research design. The qualitative meta‐analysis allows us to analyse and synthesize the wealth of previously published single‐case studies in order to develop process models of organizational failure. The most salient finding of our analysis is that failure processes converge around four distinct process archetypes, which we name imperialist, laggard, villain, and politicized. Each process archetype can be explained by the interplay of distinct rigidity and conflict mechanisms. Differentiating the four process archetypes and explaining the underlying mechanisms helps to resolve some contradictions in the previous failure process literature.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bed604d470918f328a0ee1c182bfbbb728417c52

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Citations in the corpus

• European airlines′ strategic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (January-May, 2020) (2020, background): “There are likely to be additional side-effects: the large network carriers as main beneficiaries of this state aid are clearly politicized organizations already (Habersang et al., 2019).”