---
title: "Does Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986) actually contain the '3× more likely' frame-breaking-change figure, read against the primary?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["organizational-theory","punctuated-equilibrium","executive-succession","quantitative-claim","primary-source-verification","tushman-romanelli"]
---


Surfaced while promoting `10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-do-the-primary-texts-of-gersick-1991-and.md`.
Gersick (1991) quotes Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986) verbatim (Gersick p. 24):
"externally recruited executives are more than three times more likely to initiate frame-breaking
change than existing executive teams." The figure is currently carried only at one remove — via
Gersick's Tier-1 citation — and the 1986 paper itself was **not** independently fetched.

**Why it matters:** this is a *quantitative* claim ("more than three times"), and the sourcing
floor requires Tier 1–2 read directly for numbers — a statistic is exactly what gets garbled in
transmission, and it should sit on its primary home, not on a quotation-of-a-quotation. It bears
on the executive-succession-as-exogenous-trigger thread
([[claim-tushman-romanelli-1985-reorientation-exogenous-trigger]],
[[question-new-session-onset-as-rewiring-trigger]]).

**What to check:** obtain Tushman, M. L., Newman, W. H., & Romanelli, E. (1986), "Convergence and
Upheaval: Managing the Unsteady Pace of Organizational Evolution," *California Management Review*
29(1):29–44 (listed as possibly open access at cmr.berkeley.edu). Confirm the "more than three
times more likely to initiate frame-breaking change" figure and its exact wording against the
primary, and record the sample/context it rests on. Until then the figure carries
`[unverified-quant — needs primary]` and is not promoted to a claim-note. Low–medium priority.

**Progress, 2026-09-02:** a dedicated session confirmed the *attribution* half of this
question — [[claim-gersick-1991-attributes-3x-figure-to-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986]]
read Gersick (1991) directly and confirmed she genuinely attributes this exact
sentence, with the page-42 citation, to Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986); the
phrase does not match any other paper in this author cluster, ruling out the two
misattribution/paraphrase failure modes already found elsewhere in this cluster.
But the 1986 primary itself is still unread: every route tried this session
(SAGE publisher page, ResearchGate mirror, HBS faculty listing, CMR venue
abstract-only page, Semantic Scholar aggregator, an adjacent-paper teaching
mirror, two lending-restricted Internet Archive holdings) returned either a
block or no full text — see
[[claim-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-3x-figure-unverified-against-primary]] for
the full route log. **Status: still open, narrowed.** The remaining gap is
specifically "nobody in this vault has read *California Management Review*
29(1):42" — everything upstream of that page has now been checked.