Why Organizations Turn Defensive: Institutional Unconscious and Immunological Convergence

This study aims to theorize the phenomenon in which, when internal problem-raising or deviations arise within organizations, they do not open toward substantive examination but instead converge into the reinforcement of formal procedures and symbolic sanctions. Existing research has explained defensive reactions and the suppression of voice from perspectives such as institutional isomorphism, legitimacy maintenance, threat–rigidity effects, defensive routines, whistleblowing, and organizational silence. However, an integrative dynamic model has not been sufficiently articulated regarding how internal disruptions are transformed, through a staged structure, into self-amplifying cycles of formal control. To address this theoretical gap, this study conceptualizes organizations as self-referential social systems and defines the recurrent tendency toward defensive convergence observed in response to internal disruption as the institutional unconscious. It further abstracts the operating mechanism of this tendency as the Formality–Sanction Loop (FS-Loop) and presents its temporal development as the Organizational Immune Model (OIM). The OIM consists of five stages: Institutional Gap, Threat Redefinition, Procedural Reinforcement, Institutional Fixation, and Reintegration or Marginalization. Under specific conditions, formality and sanction recursively legitimize one another, forming a self-reinforcing structure. In addition, this study specifies the operating conditions of the OIM—legitimacy fragility, procedural density, responsibility ambiguity, power asymmetry, and boundary closure—and operationalizes them into observable indicators, thereby clarifying the model’s falsifiability and empirical testability. The model does not presuppose malice or personal defects; rather, it is positioned as a middle-range theory that explains defensive responses as structural convergence emerging from the linkage of locally rational actions. By integratively connecting institutional theory, bureaucracy theory, organizational learning theory, and whistleblowing research, this study rearticulates the processing of internal disruption as a staged model and provides a theoretical foundation for repositioning organizational conflict from moral blame to structural analysis.