مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The attainment of many important outcomes in organizations is uncertain ex ante. For example, a product developer is unsure whether her new product will eventually be brought to market, an entrepreneur is unsure whether her pitch will ultimately be selected for venture capital funding, and a doctoral student does not know whether she will secure a faculty position. When facing uncertainty regarding goal attainment, some people make a backup plan (Lynch, Netemeyer, Spiller, & Zammit, 2010). The product developer might plan to take her product to a different company in case she fails to gain support for its launch at her current company, the entrepreneur might plan to go back to her old job in case she fails to secure venture capital funding for her new business, and the doctoral student might make a backup plan of taking an industry job in case she fails to receive an academic job offer. Ultimately, these backup plans are structured to help people continue to pursue their high-level, overarching goals even after they fail to achieve their primary goal, albeit in a less preferable fashion.

In this paper, we define ‘a backup plan’ as ‘a plan for achieving a new goal in case a person’s primary goal proves unattainable such that this plan still leads to the achievement of the same superordinate goal’. Two critical parts of this definition are worth emphasizing. First, a backup plan is designed to achieve a new goal that is distinct from the original, primary goal. For example, for the doctoral student mentioned above, obtaining an industry job is a new and different goal from her primary goal of securing an academic job offer. Second, the primary goal and the backup plan both facilitate fulfilling the same higher-order, superordinate goal. For example, obtaining an industry job and securing an academic job offer both achieve the superordinate goal of procuring paid employment.

Making a backup plan is common in both organizations and in everyday life. In a survey of 120 adults in a U.S. train station, after identifying a goal they were striving to achieve, 48% indicated that they had made a backup plan in case they failed to achieve that goal. For example, one person’s primary goal was ‘‘to be promoted” and her corresponding backup plan was ‘‘to change jobs.” The higher-order goal that the backup plan helps the respondent to achieve is to get a better job.