A Process Perspective on Organizational Failure: A Qualitative Meta‐Analysis

Abstract

An important stream of the organizational failure literature has proposed process models to describe how firms fail. Despite much progress, this stream is currently at a crossroads. Previous process models try to capture how failure unfolds in singular models that describe organizational failure as the result of either inertia or extremism or as a mixture of both. However, it remains unclear how these competing explanations are related and what underlying mechanisms explain why organizational failure processes unfold as they do. We address these issues by examining failure processes using a qualitative meta‐analysis research design. The qualitative meta‐analysis allows us to analyse and synthesize the wealth of previously published single‐case studies in order to develop process models of organizational failure. The most salient finding of our analysis is that failure processes converge around four distinct process archetypes, which we name imperialist, laggard, villain, and politicized. Each process archetype can be explained by the interplay of distinct rigidity and conflict mechanisms. Differentiating the four process archetypes and explaining the underlying mechanisms helps to resolve some contradictions in the previous failure process literature.

Meta‐Analytic Research in Management: Contemporary Approaches, Unresolved Controversies, and Rising Standards

“…Reaping benefits from these approaches is increasingly important for advancing knowledge in top management journals (see Shaw and Ertug, 2017) The papers in the special issue contribute to diverse literatures by leveraging metaanalysis in a variety of ways. Habersang et al (2019) leverage QMA to introduce a new theoretical typology that would have been difficult to identify using deductive methods, quantitative analysis, or single case studies. Carnes et al (2019) use MASEM to test their theorizing about key mediators while Sihag and Rijsdijk (2019) and Karam et al (2019) Maas et al, 2019;Rosenbusch et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2019) leverage external sources (e.g., World Bank) in MARA to investigate how country-level factors shape important relationships, thereby testing hypotheses that might otherwise be cost prohibitive.…”

Advancing Theory with Review Articles

“…Research agenda brings forth related gaps. As another example,Habersang et al (2019) use the avenue of theorizing with mechanisms to analyse the literature on organizational failure. They synthesize the findings by using a qualitative meta-analysis of prior singe-case studies and by building a taxonomy of four failure process archetypes imperialist, laggard, villain, and politicized -to illustrate how explanatory mechanisms play out in each type of failure processes…”

Opportunities and Threats in Reviewing Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice

“…This type of review is becoming more prominent as some researchers are uneasy about the dominance of quantitative reviews, which ignore insights from qualitative research (Hoon, 2013;Rauch et al, 2014). The synthesis of qualitative research is more common in medical research (Paterson, 2012), although there are examples in both management research (Mintzberg, Raisinghani, & Théorêt, 1976;Miller & Friesen, 1977) and entrepreneurship research (Habersang et al, 2019). There are a number of different approaches for synthesizing qualitative research to meet the different aims of the reviews.…”

“…Most importantly, it can address calls for a process view in entrepreneurship (Baron & Markman, 2004) as well as calls to contextualize the domain (Welter, 2011). Specifically, case studies often provide rich and contextualized information about how and when specific conditions interact with the context and aggregating such information helps develop evidence about such processes in entrepreneurial firms (Habersang et al, 2019). It is difficult to cover these issues in a quantitative review where processes can best be covered by coding time points and where the statistical aggregation either eliminates context conditions or addresses them by coding context at the level of the study or the country.…”