Exploring Crisis Management in UK Small‐ and Medium‐Sized Enterprises

Despite a long‐established crisis management literature that focuses on large enterprises, crisis management planning in the context of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) is less extensively researched. Using data collected from 215 SMEs in the United Kingdom, this paper explores the perceptions and experiences of SMEs' managing directors in relation to crisis management planning. Furthermore, the paper examines differences in perceptions between planning and non‐planning SMEs. Analysis reveals six factors that correspond to resilience through planning, financial impact, operational crisis management, the perfect storm, the aftermath of survival and atrophy. Results indicate how the experience of crisis and the type of crisis of type encountered affect managers' assessment of whether planning can be used to address crisis prevention and lower impact.     

Narcissism and Effective Crisis Management: A Review of Potential Problems and Pitfalls

In the event of a crisis, effective leadership by senior officials plays a significant role in an organization's attempt to return to a state of normal operation. Effectiveness, however, can be hampered by a leader's behaviour and attitude towards colleagues, and other employees within the organization. This paper explores how narcissism and narcissistic leaders may affect crisis management within an organization. Using the literature from the American Psychiatric Association, crisis management, and leadership, this paper explores how personality disorders associated with narcissism may affect the pre‐crisis, crisis, and post‐crisis stages of crisis management. The paper concludes by offering suggestions on how to handle narcissistic leaders within an organization, and areas for future research.     

Preparing for Critical Infrastructure Breakdowns: The Limits of Crisis Management and the Need for Resilience

Modern societies are widely considered to harbour an increased propensity for breakdowns of their critical infrastructure (CI) systems. While such breakdowns have proven rather rare, Hurricane Katrina has demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of such breakdowns. This article explores how public authorities can effectively prepare to cope with these rare events. Drawing from the literature on crisis and disaster management, we examine the strengths and weaknesses of traditional approaches to crisis preparation and crisis response. We argue that the established ways of organising for critical decision‐making will not suffice in the case of a catastrophic breakdown. In the immediate aftermath of such a breakdown, an effective response will depend on the adaptive behaviour of citizens, front‐line workers and middle managers. In this article, we formulate a set of strategies that enhance societal resilience and identify the strong barriers to their implementation.     

Understanding EU Crisis Decision‐making: The Case of Chechnya and the Finnish Presidency

Why did the European Union accept a limited policy risk by adopting sanctions against a difficult target, Russia, in the Chechnya conflict and what does this case tell about the EU's crisis management practice? The explanation of the decision is based on problem framing, the exertion of power and the justifications of decision‐making. The analysis shows that occasionally the Union may adopt a bold policy, if a situation is framed as a grave crisis, a strong leadership of large members emerges advocating a firm response and pressures of public opinion preclude passivity; in addition, the policy is considered justified by groupthink based on anticipation, by institutional arguments as well as lessons learnt, which are likely to lead to stronger commitments. Yet the policy is likely to be a bounded one because of constraining values and goals, previous institutional commitments and practices, countervailing policy lessons and rational recognition of the Union's limited influence. Moreover, a bold policy may prove to be inconsistent over time. As a rule the pivotal role of large EU members, established practices as well as the decentralisation and consensus‐seeking tendencies combine to limit the Union's crisis response to a restricted and supporting diplomatic and economic role. The ongoing efforts to enhance the EU's crisis management capacity are yet to change significantly these habitual patterns.     

Corporate Governance in the Context of Crises: Towards a Stakeholder Theory of Crisis Management

In this paper, we take a step towards developing a stakeholder theory of crisis management. We argue that, in the context of crises, adopting the principles of a stakeholder model of corporate governance will lead companies to engage more frequently in proactive and/or accommodating crisis management behaviour even if these crisis management behaviours are not perceived to maximize shareholder value. We also propose a mechanism that may explain why the stakeholder model may be associated with more successful crisis management outcomes. We conclude by challenging the efficacy of the shareholder view in crisis and crisis‐like situations, and call for further theoretical and empirical research.     

Decentralization in Crisis: The Case of Everest Double Glazing Installation

Change and turn-around strategies in business need to draw upon more than a literature of corporate culture for analysis and understanding. The Everest Double Glazing Company experienced an organizational transformation which precipitated rapidly into a crisis situation. The history of this case study in decentralization shows how intended management strategies aimed at change can be frustrated by complexities in behaviour and volatility in business environments. This case study brings to the fore the role of self-inducement in the evolution of crises, questions the extent to which business organizations can prepare for crisis in their own strategic planning, and clarifies comment on the mobilizing, rather than demobilizing role of crisis in corporations. Crisis management theory contributes to the understanding of many ongoing issues that contemporary management literature seems unable to explain.     

Initial Crisis Agent‐Response Impact Syndrome (ICARIS)

There has been a dramatic shift in attitude among organizations regarding the probabilities of crisis occurring. Once crises were considered the domain of the contingency management team that sought the fastest means to recovery, now the entire organization is compelled to take steps intended to mitigate conditions leading to a crisis. In this paper, the authors consider the organization's ‘first responders’ i.e., those who become involuntarily placed in the decision making process because they are the first to become aware of the conditions which indicate impending crisis simply because they are ‘on scene.’ As agents of the organization, these persons will make initial decisions well before the implementation of any formal contingency plan and because their decisions will be based on incomplete assumptions, they are likely to be in error. The impact of these initial crisis‐agent responses can cause irreparable damage to the organization, to the individuals within the organization, and to the surrounding environment. This tendency toward error is referred to as the initial crisis‐agent response impact syndrome: ICARIS. Exercising a program that prepares all employees for the initial decisions that need to be made at the moment of crisis can mitigate problems related to this issue.     

The Collective Framing of Crisis Management: A Ventriloqual Analysis of Emergency Operations Centres

Crises are omnipresent in the organizational world. To face these situations, organizations rely on their crisis management teams to better manage these situations. How do members of these teams succeed or fail to succeed in understanding each other and in collectively framing the crisis situation, when everyone's background differs? Based on an interactional perspective, the current study proposes to respond to this question by analysing a selection of audiovisual excerpts taken from three crisis management exercises conducted in Ontario, Canada. These analyses help describe the role certain figures play in the framing of crisis management. It was found that only when these different preoccupations are articulated, taken into account and negotiated can the framing of the crisis situation evolve collectively.     

Crisis Readiness in Turkey and the United States

Crisis management seeks to minimize the impact that crisis events have on organizations. While the crisis management literature is replete with studies of large organizations in developed countries, little has been written on this subject concerning businesses in emerging nations. This exploratory study investigates the perceptions and experiences of Turkish managers in relation to crisis events. Crisis readiness in Turkey and the United States is compared and contrasted. The results indicate that a majority of these organizations do not have formal crisis management plans. Recommendations are offered and implications for management are presented.     

Crisis Communications Management on the Web: How Internet‐Based Technologies are Changing the Way Public Relations Professionals Handle Business Crises

This article analyses how Internet‐based technologies can help companies to: monitor their business environment online in search of potentially conflictive issues that need to be managed (issues management); to prepare a crisis communications plan that considers the Internet side of today's business landscape (crisis communications planning); to respond adequately to crises should they arise by using all available online tools (crisis response); and to establish appropriate Internet‐based actions once the crisis dies down (post‐crisis). The article also questions whether the traditional one‐way corporate approach and tone is still suitable in the new, more participative, online business environment, or whether companies should use a different tone, language, and attitude when engaging with their audiences on the Internet in a crisis situation.     

The Potential Contribution of the Field of Organizational Development to Crisis Management

This paper explores the possibilities of cross‐disciplinarity between organization development and crisis management. The departure point of our reflection is that crisis management as a field currently faces two limitations. First, two major trends have characterized this field to date: the sociological analysis of organizational contingencies which focus on disasters as social events and the crisis management planning which emphasizes the development of techniques to master hazards. Despite what we have learned from these approaches, neither seems to lead to a crisis management learning model that fosters organizational resilience in coping with crises. Second, researchers have studied a number of events as single case studies but have not synthesized these case studies. Consequently, each crisis seems idiosyncratic and administrators tend to repeat the same inefficient patterns when a crisis occurs. The research proposal presented in this paper aims to remove these limitations by bringing together two apparently opposing fields of study, that of crisis management, characterized by what are perceived as specific events, and that of organizational development, characterized by the strengthening of organizations' capacities to cope with lasting changes. This paper proposes to explore their potential to work together theoretically and empirically through a research design. We conclude on how this proposal meets the challenges of a new research agenda in the 21st century.     

Crisis response strategies in Finland and Spain

Crises are common in today's unpredictable environment rising the importance of crisis response strategies. Two societies in Europe are chosen: Finland, where trust in society is generalized to institutions, and Spain, where trust in society remains on the level of individuals. Using the results of the European Communication Monitor 2013 survey on crisis communication, we explored three hypotheses: “certain types of crises are often met with certain types of strategies,” “cultural context makes some crises more likely than others,” and “cultural context makes some response strategies more likely than others.” We find evidence for all three hypotheses and discuss our findings about perceived differences in the two societies. The results show that the cultural context plays an important role for crisis communication.     

Did BP Atone for its Transgressions? Expanding Theory on ‘Ethical Apology’ in Crisis Communication

Ethical communication during crisis response is often assessed by external perceptions of the organization's intentions, rather than an assessment of the organization's communicative behaviors. This can easily lead researchers to draw editorial conclusions about an organization's ethics in crisis response rather than accurately describing its communicative behaviors. The case of BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico provides a prime example for the importance of accurately assessing the ethical content of an organization's crisis response because the ethics of BP's response have been discussed in news and academic sources; yet little direct examination of the ethical content in BP's response has occurred. The findings have implications for communication ethics, social media engagement, and crisis communication more generally.     

Organizational synthesis in transboundary crises: Three principles for managing centralization and coordination in the corona virus crisis response

Boin (2019) argues that in transboundary crisis management it is almost impossible to achieve centralization and coordination. This article identifies three principles through which actors in a transboundary crisis can balance centralization with autonomy while shaping coordination along the way. We reanalysed three transboundary cases: the Dutch military mission in Afghanistan, the downing of MH17 and hurricane Irma striking Sint‐Maarten. The principles we found are as follows: (a) reformulating key strategic priorities, (b) flexible adaptation of crisis management protocols and (c) the emergence of multifunctional units. With these three principles, we reflect on challenges in the Dutch crisis response to the corona outbreak and propose improvements for progressing current crisis management efforts.     

A System under Stress: The Icelandic Volcano Ash Crisis

This paper analyzes the response to the Icelandic volcano ash crisis of 2010. We examine how the original response was determined by the formal organization of the European air traffic control system, how the crisis was defined, what characterized the or new regulatory regime, and how one can explain the development and handling of the crisis. The theoretical basis is a combination of instrumental organization theory and crisis management theories. The crisis is handled via established organizational arrangements and principles that impose limits on the scope of action. The response to the crisis involved fine‐tuning in the form of an instrumental and incremental adaptation of policies, regulations and practices challenging core political values, which also exhibit elements of path dependency.     

From Disaster to Crisis: The Failed Turnaround of Pan American Airlines

The academic and corporate analysis of crisis management achieved considerable impetus during the latter part of the 1980s with the occurrence of a number of major incidents which captured media attention. The terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988 was one of the largest loss-of-life transport incidents of the decade and had serious implications for the integrity of the corporation. The bombing, whilst a discrete crisis event in itself, was part of a longer history of crisis through which the company had passed. The purpose of this paper is to explore the managerial response to crisis events within Pan Am and offer an assessment of the factors that ultimately led to the collapse of the corporation in 1991. Throughout the paper, attempts will also be made to set the events within the context of current thinking in crisis management and, in particular, to examine the demise of Pan Am within the context of a number of models of turnaround management developed within the literature.     

Improving Communication in Crisis Management by Evaluating the Relevance of Messages

Efficient communication is a major challenge for emergency responders during crisis management. Reports show that missing information and information overload are important factors that determine the success of crisis management. We propose a method as basis for a software system that improves text or voice‐based communication. Communication is split into segments and the system determines from the content of the communication, the tasks of actors and their locations for which responders in the crisis the information is relevant. The system is tested on data recorded at a fire fighting disaster management exercise and found to be accurate enough to be useful.     

Expressing Compassion in the Face of Crisis: Organizational Practices in the Aftermath of the Brisbane Floods of 2011

Compassion is almost universally acknowledged as an important issue in the crisis management literature. The dominant perspective, however, approaches compassion instrumentally. The findings of this study on the compassionate support offered (or not) to employees during and after the Brisbane flood crisis of January 2011 provide insight into crisis management as a continuous process rather than a reactionary response when disaster arises. Three significant policy implications are generated: First, compassionate discourses and categorization schemas should be clearly articulated within the organization before crisis. Second, compassionate policies and practices need to be embedded in ongoing organizational routines and policies. Third, initiatives framed as compassion responses should not be assumed to necessarily create positive outcomes; rather, outcomes should be assessed on an ongoing basis.     

In Search of Archetypes in Crisis Management

Despite their unstable nature, crises are frequently defined as opportunities for managers to make strategic decisions in terms of bringing new configurations into play. According to this perspective, research is undertaken to discover new forms taken on by organisations during times of crisis. Relying on the experience of Local Centres of Community Services in Quebec during the ice storm of 1998, the results of this research permitted us to demonstrate three archetypes of crisis management collectivists, integrators and reactive types, each with the specific characteristics and imperatives as defined by Miller (1987) . These consist of leadership, strategies, structures and environments. The research also permitted us to establish participants' appreciation of the performance of their organisation and of the managers dealt with the crisis. Finally, we will discuss the importance of applying theories of configuration in the field of crisis management and several promising areas of research in this field.     

‘He's One of Ours’: A Case Study of a Campus Response to Crisis

Early on Friday, 19 April 2013, officials at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth learned that one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was an enrolled student. That morning, the entire campus was transformed into both a crime scene and a potential target for an act of domestic terrorism. This article examines the campus response to this crisis, based on interviews with campus officials and a review of a task force report produced to review the campus response. This case study speaks to three important issues in the crisis management literature. Having a crisis plan helps (1), but testing of these plans is critical for an effective response (2). Furthermore, the plan must allow for real‐time decision making that is both centralized and decentralized (3).