Threats and Responses in Organizational Research

Abstract

In recent years, executives and their employees have faced a wide range of threats to, and within, their organization. We put forward a framework that organizational scholars can use to position their ideas within the literature on threats and responses. We delineate different types of threats that firms often face. We also develop a set of constructs that, taken together, can be useful for describing how managers assess threats and how they might react to them. In addition, we identify several theories that explain organizational threats and responses, including two (protection motivation theory and integrated threat theory) that have proven useful in other disciplines but have yet to take hold in management studies. Lastly, we offer examples of how to expand extant theories to the domain of organizational threats and conclude with a call for research on threats and responses in organizational research.