Opportunity Incorporated? Organizational identity perception in an incumbent facing change

Environmental discontinuities require incumbents to change their organizational identity from a focus on risk aversion to a focus on opportunity-seeking. The previous literature stresses that such identity change processes include changing organizational members’ perception of the ideal and current organizational identity. However, thus far, the literature provides no systematic evidence of the factors that shape how individuals within incumbent organizations perceive their organizations’ ideal and current identity. As a result, it is unclear how managers can influence the process of adapting organizational identity in times of change. In this paper, we propose that whether individuals perceive the ideal and current organizational identity as risk averse versus opportunity-seeking is shaped by individuals’ perception of (1) environmental and (2) organizational change as well as (3) their openness to change. Importantly, we propose that those factors that positively affect individuals’ ideal identity, nega...