The study examines how higher educational institutions navigate from the inertia of tradition to organizational absorption of strategy practices. The grounded theory approach was adopted for data collection and data analysis. The thematic analysis method was adopted to condense the raw data into a few meaningful themes. There were four reasons for the continuity of inertia of tradition: groupthink inertia, fear-inducing inertia, skepticism, and the endowment effect. The study found seven orientations of organizational absorption: cognitive-oriented absorption, intractability-oriented absorption, exigency and adaption-oriented absorption, endurance-oriented absorption, “tradition-hazard”-oriented absorption, transposition-oriented absorption, and employee agility-oriented absorption. There were three dimensions of organizational absorption: Structural, processual, and procedural. The study found four themes for leadership manipulations as stimuli for cultural transitions for absorption: leadership decisiveness, embracing change-seeking culture, openness and benchmarking, and dynamic decision-making.
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