How do external disruptions affect technological knowledge repository diversification? The role of repositories' historical and social aspiration levels and knowledge footprint

Abstract

This study investigates how knowledge-intensive organizations cope with the extreme uncertainty generated by external disruptions. We advance a behavioral aspirations perspective with the power to explain the antecedents and boundaries of organizational knowledge diversification. We expect that external disruptions (such as Covid-19) led organizations not to meet their aspiration levels, and thus, we set forth to find how organizations responded to this challenge. We find that not meeting the aspiration levels, both historical (self-imposed) and social (peer-imposed), drives organizations to diversify their technological knowledge repositories. Further, we find that this crisis-response behavior is mitigated by the accumulated knowledge, which we define as the knowledge footprint. The investigation of a large longitudinal dataset of U.S.-based knowledge-intensive organizations shows that the behavioral aspirations perspective has explanatory power. This work contributes to the advancement of diversification research during external disruptions and suggests potential solutions for knowledge organizations facing extreme uncertainty.