Caught in Between: A Behavioral View of Organizational Change During Institutional Change

This study investigates organizational change in the context of institutional change from the behavioral perspective. Organizations situated in institutional change have to attend to two distinct goals: one goal pertaining to the emerging institutional logic and the other corresponding to the incumbent logic. The juxtaposition of competing logics exerts important impact on slack search and problemistic search. We find dual effect of slack resources on the adoption of practices reflecting the emergent logic. Organizations use abundant slack to avoid changes that are inconsistent with the incumbent procedure. However, less abundant slack plays a facilitating role because it makes inevitable changes easier to occur. This study also demonstrates that during institutional change, decisions to implement practices reflecting the emerging logic can be characterized by passivity due to the lasting influence of the incumbent logic.