Threat-Rigidity Hypothesis

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2, University of Graz (Institut fur Technologie- und Innovationsmanagement), course: Seminar Ausgewahlte Aspekte des Innovationsmanagements, 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 changeis an important issue. For researchers to find underlying principles of behavior under threatand 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 willthere be an even larger number of snow making machines on the slopes if there is absolutelyno snow due to global warming and the upcoming climate crisis? Or will there somealternatives 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 formski and snowboard toward wellness, mountain biking or hiking. So what will entrepreneurs inskiing resorts do? Will the rely on well-learned behavior and put another snow makingmachine beside the slope, or will they consider alternatives?There are numerous studies treating behavior under threat or radical change of environmentalconditions. Six papers among them the basic paper for this work, Staw et al s1 analysis ofthreat-rigidity effects in organizational behavior will subsequently be examined with regardto consistencies or contradictions. As already mentioned, Staw et al s paper will be regardedas the basis for this seminar paper, as it points out most clearly threat-rigidity effects atdifferent levels of analysis. Moreover it is 1.) the oldest reviewed article and seems to havesome influence on threat-rigidity research in recent decades and 2.) represents acomprehensive literature review in contrast to the other mainly empirical papers andtherefore presents a fine overview for our topic. Therefore chapter two will start with briefdiscussions 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.