The Relationship Between External Environmental Pressure And Organizational Decoupling:The Moderating Effect Of Organizational Characteristic And Legitimacy Distance

The development of organizational system theory makes the relationship between external environmental pressure and organizational decoupling a new research problem.From the perspective of institutional diffusion theory,changes in the external institutional environment lead to the change of the external legitimacy.As an open system,the organization needs to continuously obtain legitimacy from outside(often also means the vital resources)to maintain the organization's own survival and development,to this end the organization under the pressure of the external environment to implement the new system but will take different strategies,such as compliance strategy,decoupling strategy and so on.Therefore,the external system environment will have an impact on the organizational decoupling.The existing research has not reached a consensus on the relationship between the external environmental pressure and organizational decoupling.At the same time,we found that even in the face of the same external pressure,different organizations have different decoupling phenomenon,the mechanism is not clear.In this regard,to explore the situational factors that affect the organizational decoupling and further understand the mechanism of decoupling which has become the key to the study.Taking into account that the heterogeneity of enterprises will affect the organization's ability to access resources and deal with external pressure,and legitimacy distance is the impact of the need to make efforts as the organization try to obtain the legitimacy,When the enterprise carries out the new system,it will be bound by its own ability and the legitimacy distance.Therefore,this paper introduces the variable of organizational characteristics and legitimacy distance into the research of the relationship between the external environmental pressure and organizational decoupling to investigate whether there is a moderating effect.In this paper,by reviewing the existing literature we summarized the relationship between the variables,put forward the hypothesis and established the research model.We collected the data of 535 A-share listed companies in 2014 through the CSMAR,RKS and Sina Finance and Economics,Cninfo etc.Then,we analyzed the effective data by SPSS 19.0 statistical analysis software and find that:Firstly,each dimension of the external environmental pressure has a significant impact on the organizational decoupling,and regulative pressure,normative pressure,mimetic pressure were significantly negative correlation with the organizational decoupling.Secondly,it verifies the moderating effects of the organizational characteristics on the external environmental pressure and organizational decoupling.The organizational scale has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between regulative pressure,normative pressure,mimetic pressure and organizational decoupling.The organizational status has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between mimetic pressure and organizational decoupling,but the moderating effect of the relationship between regulative pressure,normative pressure and organizational decoupling is not significant.Finally,we verify the moderating effects of the legitimacy distance on the external environmental pressure and organizational decoupling.The legitimacy distance has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between regulative pressure,mimetic pressure and organizational decoupling,but the moderating effect of the relationship between normative pressure and organizational decoupling is not significant.This paper empirically studied the relationship between the external environmental pressure and organizational decoupling and introduced the organizational characteristics and legitimacy distance as the moderator variables between them.It enriched the theory of organizational decoupling and did a useful supplement to the existing research results about factors affecting the decoupling.The research on the mechanism of organizational decoupling is perfected by considering the factors of organizational context.Furthermore,it also deepened our understanding of the theory of institutional diffusion and provided new ideas for the selection of intermediate variables.