Resumo

Organizations are not isolated from their environments and depend on their fit with and within their sectors to survive. This is part of the evolutionary perspective in strategy, especially from an Industrial Organizations’ standpoint. That is, whenever organizations face sudden changes in their environments, their reaction, and further adaptation, may become impaired. This is due to several aspects, such as threat rigidity (i.e., freezing) when there is maladaptive reaction towards the fit with the environment.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are part of a never-ending cycle of adaptations with and within their environment, especially if private-funded HEIs are considered, and, consequently, are frequently prone to display rigidity in face of threats. Such changes and their consequential quick adaptations (or misalignments) may induce certain levels of uncertainty in HEIs. Thus, our main objective is assessing the extent of both external and internal crisis’ effects on perceived job insecurity and job performance.

The effects of crises and their maladaptive reactions in HEIs still merit research because they most commonly lead to organizational decline (Daly et al., 2011; Serra et al., 2013; Daly et al., 2015). Among these, the Threat Rigidity thesis prescribes that organizations facing acute threats will have impaired responses to the changes in their environments, which may have internal consequences for their management. The effects of both on perceived job insecurity and performance, from a microfoundations of strategy standpoint (Lee and Zhang, 2013; Lin and Yu, 2014) still lacks consistent results

Our sample is comprised of 505 currently employed faculty in private HEIs in Brazil. The choice of country was due to recent shocks and instabilities amongst the local private HEI sector in that may enhance the salience of the crisis perception from the faculty standpoint. To test our hypotheses, we employed a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). We hypothesized that both external crisis and internal crises affect job insecurity and performance, and the hypotheses were confirmed.

The results contribute in reinforcing the notion that misalignments between organizational strategy and the environment lead organizations to perceive such developments as crises; that performance is not only linked to the internal environment of the organizations but also of the macro external environment, and finally that insecurity in private HEIs lead to less perceived job performance.

Our work has its limitations, the main one being the sample made of only one country. Also, we measured self-assessed job insecurity and job performance instead of gathering actual data, and as such these may be affected by the respondent’s personal beliefs and personality traits as well as uncontrollable and circumstantial aspects.

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