Field Disasters, Routine Shifts, and Adaptation Performance: Evidence from the Chernobyl disaster

Following a field disaster, organizations must be able to adapt to complicated new requirements like improved safety standards by changing their existing routines. Post-disaster, fewer deviations attributed to internal factors are expected and seen as evidence of adaptation. Using a difference-in-differences approach with data on nuclear power plants (NPPs) in 33 countries from 1976 to 2004, this study finds that, contrary to expectations, operational deviations attributed to human factors at NPPs increased globally for a long period after the Chernobyl disaster. This study argues that this counterintuitive performance is a manifestation of adaptive routines. To adapt to the environmental requirements for heightened safety standards, organizations may tend to alter their routines for attributing deviation causes by facilitating and transparently reporting the classification of more deviation causes as internal factors. These arguments extend organizational adaptation theory by suggesting that explicit performance does not necessarily manifest as adaptive routines because of the potential conflict between explicit and implicit performance dimensions in the context of complicated adaptation goals.