A persistently pressing issue identified in the decision‐making literature is that people not only fail to recognize the risks entailed in a near‐loss event but also subsequently engage in further risk‐taking. We contend in this paper that prevention motivation critically regulates decision‐makers' responses to a near‐loss. Across three studies, we found that high prevention‐focused individuals perceive greater risks in a near‐loss event and are subsequently less likely to take risks, compared with low prevention‐focused individuals. This finding highlights the significance of applying a motivational perspective to studying decision‐making and risk.

Organizations face increasing demand to make meaningful, sustainable changes based on shifts in their external environments. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for insightful, useful research in the field of organizational change. As in other management science disciplines, the field suffers from a gap between research-favoring rigor and practice-favoring relevance. Through the framework of engaged scholarship—a collaborative approach to knowledge production—we present organizational change research as particularly well-positioned to utilize existing gap-related tensions to advance the field in terms of effective academic- and practice-based outcomes. We highlight empirical efforts in organizational change applied research that have contributed to theory building, method development, and practice knowledge. We include interview data collected from scholar-practitioners in the field and focus on the work of W. Warner Burke, in particular, for this special issue honoring the legacy of his rigorous and relevant contributions to the science and practice of organizational change.

Organizational members' responses to organizational change have a key role in determining the success of the change. The predominant conceptualization of responses to change has focused on the valence of responsesthe degree to which they are positive (e.g., openness to change) versus negative (e.g., resistance to change). Yet, recent theory suggests that rather than a single continuum, ranging from negative to positive, responses to change are better represented with a bidimensional framework including both a valence-based continuum and an activation-based continuum (active vs. passive; Oreg et al., 2018), comprising a change response circumplex. Based on this theoretical framework, we develop and validate a scale for measuring the four dimensions of the change response circumplex (i.e., change acceptance, change proactivity, change disengagement, change resistance). We conducted five studies in which we develop the scale and demonstrate its content validity (Study 1, N = 208), circumplex structure and construct validity (Study 2, N = 221; Study 3, N = 315), concurrent validity (Study 4, N = 588), and predictive validity (Study 5, N = 146). We also demonstrate the usefulness of distinguishing among the four responses for predicting the amount and types of feedback that change recipients provide, and show the particular value of active responses, above and beyond valence.

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