This study examined whether organizational change efforts under hostile environment could prevent organizational failure or not. Organizations are making efforts to avoid the failure, but whether these efforts are effective or not remains yet controversial. Previous studies have proposed inconsistent arguments about the effectiveness of the change efforts. Studies emphasizing organizational adaptive capacity and the contents of organizational change have expected positive results of the change efforts, while others emphasizing natural selection and organizational change processes have predicted negative outcomes. Organizational change efforts and their effectiveness has drawn much attention to strategic management scholars and organizational adaptation and contingency theorists as well. They proposed the needs for organizational change to survive and prosper, given the changing nature of organizational environments. But organizational ecologists argue that organizations can not overcome the great difficulties in adapting to uncertain and fast changing environments, albeit various kinds of organizational changes are attempted in reality. In this view, organizational change efforts have a limited influence and organization can be still exposed to failure risk,because organizational cores are damaged and thus it would face the “liability of newness”. In examining whether organizational change increase or decrease organizational failure, we adopted four independent variables which are considered as major organizational changes;business scope change, CEO change, workforce reduction, and accumulated organizational slack. We drew and utilized extensive database of Korea Specialty Contractor Financial Cooperative (KSCFC). A population of 42,365 firms were extracted during the 6 years from 2007 to 2012. During this period, Korean construction firms had experienced not only economic shocks initiated by global economic downturn but also institutional shocks caused by deregulation and unlimited bidding competition. These shocks led to hostile business environments, especially for Specialty Contractor companies, so they faced fierce competition for limited resources available in the market. Drawing on rich and objective database from KSCFC, we formed solid objective variables for our study, such as business scope change defined as actual change of business licenses and organizational failure including actual operational discontinuance and bankruptcy. We also obtained and used actual financial data including financial performance of current and previous years, and initial endowments. A total of 168,673 pooled data for 6 years under the hostile environment were analyzed by using the discrete-time logit regression model. Tested are the three competing hypotheses about the relationships between the three change variables(business scope change, CEO Cchange and workforce reduction) and organizational failure. One hypothesis was proposed about the relationship between organizational slack and organizational failure. H1a : Business scope change will decrease organizational failure. H1b : Business scope change will increase organizational failure. H2a : CEO change will decrease organizational failure. H2b : CEO change will increase organizational failure. H3a : Workforce reduction will decrease organizational failure. H3b : Workforce reduction will increase organizational failure. H4 : Organizational slack will decrease organizational failure. The findings of this study are very intriguing. Net effects of the antecedents were examined with important financial variables controlled, while previous studies had not controlled financial variables effectively. The results showed that business scope enlargement decreased organizational failure while business scope contraction, CEO change and workforce reduction increased the failure. Organizational slack always showed negative relationships with organizational failure. These findings suggest that the two different, competing views work complementarily to account for the relationship between organizational changes and failures. Based on the findings, the paper explores relevant theoretical and practical implications,methodological implications, and future research directions.