Threat-Rigidity Hypothesis

An analysis of six scientific papers

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2, University of Graz (Institut für Technologie- und Innovationsmanagement), course: Seminar Ausgewählte Aspekte des Innovationsmanagements, 6 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: For economists (and also sociologists or psychologists) - no matter if they are students, practitioners or researchers - the behavior of individuals, groups or entire organizations (e. g. companies) under special circumstances like threat, adversity or radical environmental change is an important issue. For researchers to find underlying principles of behavior under threat and for practitioners to learn some basic rules for behaving in changing environments. Imagine a winter in our alps without any snow. There have always been times with less snow. In such case snow making machines did their job and sprinkled the slope with artificial snow. The lesser snow the more snow making machines was the easy calculus in past years. So will there be an even larger number of snow making machines on the slopes if there is absolutely no snow due to global warming and the upcoming climate crisis? Or will there some alternatives be developed? According to an recent article in DerStandard (16. december 2006, p. 2), wintertourism has to change its face, additional offers have to be presented, away form ski and snowboard toward wellness, mountain biking or hiking. So what will entrepreneurs in skiing resorts do? Will the rely on well-learned behavior and put another snow making machine beside the slope, or will they consider alternatives? There are numerous studies treating behavior under threat or radical change of environmental conditions. Six papers - among them the basic paper for this work, Staw et al's1 analysis of threat-rigidity effects in organizational behavior - will subsequently be examined with regard to consistencies or contradictions. As already mentioned, Staw et al's paper will be regarded as the basis for this seminar paper, as it points out most clearly threat-rigidity effects at different levels of analysis. Moreover it is 1.) the oldest reviewed article and seems to have some influence on threat-rigidity research in recent decades and 2.) represents a comprehensive literature review in contrast to the other - mainly empirical - papers and therefore presents a fine overview for our topic. Therefore chapter two will start with brief discussions of the Threat-Rigidity Hypothesis and Threat-Rigidity Effects on the individualleve, group-level and organizational-level as described in Staw et. al's paper.