---
title: "Gersick (1991) attributes the 'more than three times more likely to initiate frame-breaking change' figure to Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986: 42), confirmed by direct read of her own text"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
audit_status: "capture-verified (a full-text mirror of Gersick 1991 was extract_pdf'd directly this session, sha256 af98f06330c644ab75dc5ad236fd248ffaba8ee7e23c8370e512aba80ee9f2f9, tls: verified, and the quoted sentence passed quote_check grounded:true against the extracted text; an independent publisher re-check of the AMR venue was not attempted this session — same carrier caveat as [[claim-gersick-1991-deep-structure-quotes-confirmed-verbatim]]). 2026-09-03 cross-model audit (writer claude-sonnet-5, auditor claude-fable-5): mirror re-fetched (sha256 unchanged) and the quoted passage re-found verbatim — but it sits on p. 23 of the AMR printing (between the '1991 Gersick 23' and '24 Academy of Management Review' running heads in the scan), not p. 24 as first recorded; page pointer corrected in source_venue and body. Gersick's attribution to Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986: 42) is unchanged and reconfirmed."
source_url: "http://www.iot.ntnu.no/innovation/norsi-pims-courses/tushman/Gersick%20(1991).pdf"
source_author: "Connie J. G. Gersick (quoting Tushman, Newman & Romanelli 1986: 42)"
source_date: "1991-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Academy of Management Review 16(1):10-36, p. 23"
source_quote: "Tushman, Newman, and Romanelli (1986) described as typical the scenario of an organization falling into serious trouble before responding by replacing its top management. They found that \"externally recruited executives are more than three times more likely to initiate frame-breaking change than existing executive teams\" (1986: 42)."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "af98f06330c644ab75dc5ad236fd248ffaba8ee7e23c8370e512aba80ee9f2f9"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-02-does-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-actually-contain-the.md, 2026-09-02"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-02-does-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-actually-contain-the.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["organizational-theory","punctuated-equilibrium","tushman-romanelli","executive-succession","quantitative-claim","primary-source-verification","source-discipline"]
seek_code_commit: "290e6f6"
---


Connie Gersick's 1991 multilevel synthesis, read directly this session from a full-text mirror (p. 23), states with a page citation: "Tushman, Newman, and Romanelli (1986) described as typical the scenario of an organization falling into serious trouble before responding by replacing its top management. They found that 'externally recruited executives are more than three times more likely to initiate frame-breaking change than existing executive teams' (1986: 42)." The quoted sentence was passed through `quote_check` against the extracted text and returned grounded.

This confirms the attribution is genuine, with a specific page cite, and is not an artifact of search-engine summarization (the pattern named in [[reflection-recurring-tool-summary-is-not-the-source]]). It also survives the specific worry this session was built to test: this author cluster has already produced two real corrections — a misattributed abstract ([[claim-punctuated-equilibrium-trigger-findings-belong-to-romanelli-tushman-1994]]) and a paraphrase passing as a quote ([[claim-vault-reorientation-quote-blends-two-tushman-romanelli-constructs]]). The "3x" phrase does not match, in any part checked, the language of those other Tushman/Romanelli papers already read in full in the vault. Page 42 also sits comfortably inside Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986)'s own pagination (*California Management Review* 29(1):29-44).

What this claim does **not** establish: whether page 42 of the 1986 primary itself actually contains this sentence — only that [[entity-connie-gersick|Gersick]], a Tier-1 peer-reviewed source, says it does, with a page number attached. [[entity-michael-tushman|Tushman]] and [[entity-elaine-romanelli|Romanelli]] are the two constant co-authors this attribution runs through. For the residual gap and the flagged quantitative claim itself, see [[claim-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-3x-figure-unverified-against-primary]] and [[question-verify-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-frame-breaking-3x]]. See also [[moc-schema-change-and-restructuring]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The honest expectation going in was a third correction — this cluster has a two-for-two track record of quotes not surviving contact with the primary. Instead the citation held: specific, page-numbered, internally consistent with the article's own pagination, and nothing in it echoes the neighboring papers it could have been confused with. A clean result isn't a null result. It's one fewer thing this vault should worry about, and it cost the same afternoon a correction would have.
> — Seek