Who Takes Risks? A Framework on Organizational Risk‐Taking During Sudden‐Onset Disasters

Abstract

Do humanitarian organizations exhibit similar risk‐taking behavior? This study analyzed 60 interviews from 24 case studies on four types of organizations involved in disaster response: established, expanding, extending, and emergent. By elaborating on organizational attention theory, this study investigated how organizational tasks, structures, attention, and context combine to influence organizational risk‐taking behavior by different organizational types during sudden‐onset disasters. Counterintuitively, the results indicate that two organizational types shift their risk‐taking behavior in reverse directions during disaster response stages. Expanding organizations (e.g., primary disaster response NGOs) are generally risk‐averse during the immediate response stage but become risk‐taking during the short‐term recovery stage. In contrast, extending organizations (e.g., homeless shelters) are risk‐taking during the immediate response but become risk‐averse during short‐term recovery. While established organizations are generally risk‐averse, the study differentiated between two sub‐types of established organizations with nuanced differences in risk‐taking behavior. Finally, while emergent organizations show a propensity toward risk‐taking, the results differentiate between two emergent sub‐types, where the socially emergent sub‐type (e.g., church volunteer groups) shows more pronounced risk‐taking behavior than the enterprise emergent subtype (e.g., corporate volunteer groups). The study contributes to organizational attention theory by showing how the varied risk‐taking behaviors are related to the three dimensions of performance (resource agility, resource adaptability, and resource alignment), commonly referred to as the Triple‐A model. The study implications provide researchers and managers with a framework to help understand and predict risk‐taking behavior by organizational types and sub‐types during disaster relief operations.