The topic of corporate distress and turnaround has been of interest to organizational change theory for many decades. This article considers existing reviews in discussing the current body of turnaround literature across multiple research fields and structures its work along a holistic framework. The numerous facets of corporate turnaround, resorting to general corporate restructuring research classifications, are clustered in a more detailed manner than those that merely rely on two commonly employed turnaround dimensions: ''retrenchment'' and ''recovery.'' The authors develop an agenda for future research based on this cross-disciplinary literature aggregation by highlighting current gaps and offering potential research questions. The review contributes to the understanding of corporate distress and turnaround by integrating different research streams. Additionally, the work emphasizes the need for further harmonization and operationalization in turnaround success metrics.
Purpose
Sensemaking models generally lack an objective determinant to distinguish between CEO fault and changes in systematic risk caused by exogenous negative shocks like a banking crisis. The interdisciplinary approach of this paper combines attribution theory with econometric time series analyses to provide an objective measure of exogeneity and persistence of a negative shock to an organization. The purpose of this paper is to address the exploratory research question, of how scapegoating by managers can be avoided by the use of an objective and empirical measurement and if the recent financial crisis can be seen as an exogenous shock to manufacturing firms.
Design/methodology/approach
By testing for stationarity with a structural break with an econometric time series analysis, the model helps to reduce agency costs during organizational crisis by effectively determining crisis causation and avoid scapegoating by managers.
Findings
By combining the sensemaking models of Haleblian and Rajagopalan (2006), Staw (1980), and Weick (1988), an integrated model of sensemaking in performance crises under the specific context of simultaneously occurring external crises is provided. By applying the authors approach the results suggest that the financial crisis of 2008/2009 has true exogenous adverse effects on US manufacturing firms.
Originality/value
The interdisciplinary approach encourages the integration of econometric time series analysis as an objective determinant in sense making models.
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