Organisations change when performance falls below aspiration and become conservative when it exceeds it, so the trigger for search is a comparison rather than an opportunity.
Cyert and March's behavioural theory replaces optimisation with an aspiration level set by the organisation's own history and by comparable others. Above it, slack accumulates and search stops; below it, search intensifies and risk tolerance rises. It predicts that firms in identical objective conditions behave differently according to what they had been expecting.
In practice
- A division hitting target investigates nothing, and the same division one point below target commissions three reviews.
- A team that raised its own expectations after a good year treats an ordinary year as a crisis.