The Process of Organizational Death: Disbanding and Reconnecting

Abstract

I thank Reginald Bruce, Stanley Harris, and Susan Schurman for helping me gather these data. I thank Janice Beyer, Richard Daft, Thomas D'Aunno, Daniel Denison, Leonard Greenhalgh, Richard Hackman, Robert Kahn, Gerald Ledford, Debra Meyerson, Marina Park, Richard Price, John Van Maanen, Janet Weiss, and Mayer Zald for their help with this manuscript. I also wish to thank the ASQ editors and reviewers for their good advice. Portions of this paper were prepared while I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. A qualitative and inductive study of eight organizational death is used to develop a model of how some dying organizations make the transition to death. The model focuses on the relationship between a dying organization and its members and on how leaders help orchestrate changes in the socially defined reality that members share about the organization's viability. The paper shows how the announcement that organizational death will occur encourages members to begin dismantling their organization. A key finding is that, contrary to leaders' predictions, members' efforts will often remain constant or increase after a closing is announced. A model to explain this phenomenon is created. The process of organizational death proposed here seems to best describe unambiguous organizational deaths that are announced in advance, those in which the organizations are dismantled through the efforts of their members, and those not characterized by severe conflict over the distribution of resources and obligations.'