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.     

An Exploratory Model for Evaluating Crisis Events and Managers' Concerns in Non‐Profit Organisations

Few organisations avoid the experience of crisis management. Some time during their life they are confronted with some type of crisis that may strain their resources and distract them from their central mission of serving its clients. Crisis management seeks to minimise the impact of these events. Although the crisis management literature is plentiful regarding larger organisations, little has been written on this subject as it relates to non‐profit organisations. This study examines the perceptions and experiences of crisis events among non‐profit organisation managers located in the north‐eastern part of the U.S. The results reveal that only a little more than a quarter of the respondents indicated that a formal crisis management team or any plans to implement it were operating in their non‐profit organisation.     

What were we thinking? A scoping review of crisis management pandemic literature (1984–2019)

Pandemics are now the focus of research attention in the fields of preparedness and crisis management. As pandemics are some of the largest crises to occur, an important question becomes ‘what were the field of crisis management thinking about pandemic management’. This paper investigates how the field of crisis management have incorporated the body of knowledge arising from pandemics into its science (from 1984 to 2019). We performed a scoping review of 4 journals on crisis management and what they have written about pandemics (230 papers). The findings are summarized in eight different categories. The main result is that the field of crisis management have shown sparse interest in pandemics. We attribute this to factors such as fragmentation of academic sciences when the problem-solving needs integration, perceived incommensurability and the organization of attention. We argue that the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic can provide a basis for posing new questions in research on, and the political debate around, societal vulnerability at large and not only restricted to recent experiences of particular crises. Finally, we argue that this will need a stronger integration of research strands and communities, which in turn require the ability to ‘connect the dots’ between different sources of knowledge.     

Unrecognized crisis management—Normalizing everyday work

The aim of this study was to examine the practices of crisis management adopted by operative staff when facing a crisis situation in their workplace. This research is based on interviews with personnel from social services and staff from homes for unaccompanied youth. The interviewees asked respondents about their actions in caring for young refugees during the refugee situation. The results are structured around three themes: everyday practices, crisis work, and the process of normalization. Three practices for handling the situation—improvisation, prioritization, and creating alternatives—served as crisis management‐as‐practice. The staff members' everyday practice for solving problems became the basic method employed during the crisis to normalize everyday work.     

What Business Owners Expect From a Crisis Manager? A Competency Model: Survey Results From Czech Businesses

This competency model of a crisis manager has been developed based on cooperation with managers and experts in the field of crisis management. The brainwriting method was used to generate an overview of the competencies expected of a crisis manager. Using a mind map three basic groups of competencies were developed. The participants used Saaty's method to determine the significance of individual competencies. The different attributes of individual competencies according to the level of their development were established. Finally all individual competencies were assigned a target value which indicates the expected level of competence for the position of a crisis manager. The model of competencies is a practical tool for the establishment of crisis management system in a company.     

Social media mapping innovations for crisis prevention,response, and evaluation

Social media has had a noticeable influence on the practice of crisis communication. Crisis managers are becoming increasingly attracted to social media because of the ability to expand the communication options available to organizations and their publics during a crisis. Previous researchers have identified a variety of benefits and challenges presented by the use of social media for crisis communication. Two new social media mapping applications, SituMap and PhotoSorter, were recently developed to cultivate participation, collaboration, and conversation specifically for crisis communication. The purpose of the present investigation is to explore the features of these applications and discuss the potential benefits of these features for crisis managers in each stage of the crisis lifecycle.     

Relational immunity? Examining relationship as crisis shield

This study examined the influence of a crisis on relational perceptions and the role of an empathetic response from stakeholders by investigating students’ perceptions of their relationship with a university following an on‐campus shooting. Findings show that despite the generally positive relationship, the university maintains with its students, the crisis had a negative impact on the students’ perceptions of their relationship with the university. Furthermore, results show how emotions, especially empathy, about an organization in a crisis situation can influence stakeholder relationships. This research helps provide nuance to the extant scholarship on crisis and emotions by introducing stakeholder empathy as a theoretical construct. Results also demonstrate that crisis managers who invest in relationship building before a crisis may elicit empathy more than blame in a crisis and may emerge with less relational damage.     

“Damned if you do,damned if you don’t”: Media frames of responsibility and accountability in handling a wildfire

Previous research on media framing of wildfire has chiefly been concerned with the nature of wildfire in the context of climate change and with framing effects on policy and public opinion. Empirical studies on media content, hence what is mediated to crisis managers and the public concerning authorities’ and the public's response, seem to be largely missing. This is remarkable, given that the media represent main sources of information that may influence crisis management and shape public opinion. Thus, the aim of this study was to identify key media frames relating to portrayals of public and authority responses during and after a wildfire crisis. The study is based on media articles from two time periods: immediately after the fire and 1 year later. We used a thematic method of analysis (TA), thus an inductive, “bottom‐up” approach. A core frame, Responsibility/accountability is identified, underpinned by two sub‐themes. One sub‐theme relates to the causes of the fire and its escalation, revealing a number of different interrelated blame frames. The second sub‐theme refers to management of the crisis, reflecting both authorities’ and citizens’ responses. The deficiencies of the former are implicitly suggested to have forced citizens to act to compensate for their inadequacy. The main theoretical contribution is the identification of an interrelationship between frames in relation to different groups of individuals responding to a crisis, pointing to a more complex view of framing effects. In addition, results show how media tend to assess crisis management based on idealistic criteria, inevitably making the evaluation negative. This contributes to an understanding of how media blame frames, thus “blame games,” may unfold. Practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Opening organizational learning in crisis management: On the affordances of social media

Research on the role of social media in crisis management has led to a deeper understanding of their affordances. This research, however, is fragmented, with a primary focus on crisis response. We lack a clear conceptualization of the affordances that social media offer by learning from them to prepare strategically for crises. Based on a systematic review of 128 papers, we inductively build a framework of social media affordances for organizational learning in crisis management. We discuss their role and interplay in strategic crisis management, focusing on organizational crisis learning, and outline avenues for future research based on this foundation.     

Wielding a Double‐Edged Sword: The Use of Inquiries at Times of Crisis

Inquiries are often seen as a useful tool to deal with a crisis. By installing an inquiry, crisis managers show that they are in control of the crisis response. Moreover, they can hope that by the time the inquiry publishes its report a new topic has caught the attention of media and Parliament and reform measures do not need to be taken to end the crisis ( McConnell, 2003 ). Following a series of riots in British prisons in 1990, the Home Secretary installed an inquiry. By the time the Woolf inquiry published its report, media and Parliamentary attention for the British Prison Service was indeed dwindling. Normally, this low level of attention would provide political actors room to end the crisis with mere small measures and no need for reform. Yet in this case, and contrary to the dominant view on how inquiries influence the crisis management process, the Woolf inquiry provided an unexpected impetus to the crisis managing process, resulting in institutional reform of the British Prison Service (or to be more accurate, the Prison Service of England and Wales). This article shows how an inquiry can have an unexpected effect for political actors managing the crisis by introducing a new way of defining the problem at hand.     

Preparation for Crisis Management: A Proposed Model and Empirical Evidence

This article explores the forces restricting effective crisis management in a crisis ridden industry. Models of crisis preparedness have typically been developed based upon research in US or Western business. This study is based upon the Egyptian industry which, until the 1990s was state owned and heavily state supported. Changes in government policy, combined with external forces, not in the least the loss of markets in the previous Soviet bloc, had plunged the industry into serious crisis. Crisis is a cultural embarrassment to most Egyptian managers and this, combined with the depth of economic difficulties faced by the industry, makes it extraordinarily difficult for any level of crisis preparedness to be achieved. Based on interview and questionnaire data, this article extends existing models of crisis preparedness to better accommodate conditions in crisis prone industries outside the West. New dimensions in the proposed model are the stress on national culture and how this limits the range of managerial responses. This in turn requires the active development of an organisational culture to counteract these limitations.     

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.     

Factors Influencing the Selection of Decision Support Systems for Emergency Management: An Empirical Analysis of Current Use and User Preferences

Computer‐aided decision support systems can be valuable tools in crisis response and preparedness training for emergency management professionals. However, to realize their full value, these tools must be designed with the needs of a broad range of potential users in mind. This paper describes preliminary research to determine how decision support systems are used by emergency managers and other officials as well as specific user needs for decision support in the planning, response and recovery from natural hazards and other extreme events. It seeks to identify which attributes of these systems are most desired by emergency management practitioners, the benefits and drawbacks as perceived by both users and non‐users of the systems and areas where improvements are desired.     

Cognitive Mapping as an Emergency Management Training Exercise

This paper describes a scenario‐based, table‐top exercise which was given to a variety of postgraduate university classes in emergency preparedness and to some groups of trainee disaster managers. Participants in the exercise were asked to draw maps of a developing crisis situation and suggest a set of tactics for managing it. The results were analysed using theories of cognitive mapping. They showed that seven distinct kinds of map emerged from the sample of 67 collected. These were labelled well‐defined, systematic, emblematic, ill‐defined (cryptic), compressed, diagrammatic (ideographic) and mirror image. About 60 per cent of the maps depicted the majority of the elements, while the remaining 40 per cent were lacking in detail to varying degrees. The cognitive maps therefore introduced distortions into the representation of elements, and these were negatively correlated with the abilities, experience, knowledge and training of their authors, as manifested by their other work in the classroom. The extraordinary variety of perceptions of space and place during emergencies has considerable implications for how such events are managed during the crisis phase.     

Facebook and Twitter in Crisis Communication: A Comparative Study of Crisis Communication Professionals and Citizens

This mixed‐methods study presents a comparative analysis of the use and perceived usefulness of Facebook and Twitter, among Swedish citizens and crisis communication professionals, as crisis communication tools and information sources. The use and perceived usefulness of Facebook and Twitter are not congruent and consistent between the two different groups, according to the overall study. Communication professionals, for example, report higher levels of perceived usefulness regarding Facebook's potential as a crisis communication tool than do the citizens. Taken together, the results show that researchers (within social media and crisis communication) and crisis managers both need to deal with the fact that social media is not a homogenous phenomenon with a single coherent role in crisis management and communication research and practice.     

Policy driven management for distributed systems

Separating management policy from the automated managers which interpret the policy facilitates the dynamic change of behavior of a distributed management system. This permits it to adapt to evolutionary changes in the system being managed and to new application requirements. Changing the behavior of automated managers can be achieved by changing the policy without having to reimplement them—this permits the reuse of the managers in different environments. It is also useful to have a clear specification of the policy applying to human managers in an enterprise. This paper describes the work on policy which has come out of two related ESPRIT funded projects, SysMan and IDSM. Two classes of policy are elaborated—authorization policies define what a manager is permitted to do and obligation policies define what a manager must do. Policies are specified as objects which define a relationship between subjects (managers) and targets (managed objects). Domains are used to group the objects to which a policy applies. Policy objects also have attributes specifying the action to be performed and constraints limiting the applicability of the policy. We show how a number of example policies can be modeled using these objects and briefly mention issues relating to policy hierarchy and conflicts between overlapping policies.     

How experienced project managers assess risk

Software development projects, given their diverse and abstract nature, offer unique challenges and risks. Although a substantial body of literature has been written to address project risk management, my experience in the field led me to question whether this literature accurately mirrors the concerns of real-world project managers. To confirm my suspicions, I surveyed 14 experienced application systems developers, all located in Ireland. All survey participants manage custom-built, software-intensive application development projects that originate from external clients. The survey focused on three major areas: (1) Which characteristics of the customer, the application, and so on, do experienced software project managers consider important when planning new development projects for new, external clients? (2) How do these characteristics relate to accepted software project risk drivers? (3) Do most project managers characterize new projects in generally the same way, or do different project managers use different perceptual lenses when viewing new projects? This survey of a homogenous group of project managers revealed a surprising diversity of risk management concerns     

Hybrid managers — what do we know about them?

Abstract. There is increasing interest in 'hybrid managers', a breed of managers who blend information management skills with general management skills. Such people are perceived as important in enabling organizations to exploit information systems effectively in today's competitive business environment.
Based on a literature survey this paper summarizes what we know about hybrid managers, as expressed by both 'expert opinion' and formal research studies. We conclude that little substantive research has been conducted into hybrid managers. Much has still to be learnt about their possible role, characteristics and competences; and how organizations should recruit and develop them. Because of the paucity of published material about 'hybrids' in the information systems context, we have drawn inferences from appropriate analogues in other functions — namely personnel, finance and R&D. Relevant studies in related areas of information systems, general management, careers and management development are also put into the 'hybrid' context.     

Organizational Adaptation in Multi‐Stakeholder Crisis Response: An Experimental Study

Modern day crises demand organizations to collaborate and adapt to new roles, functions and structures. In such situations, lack of collaborative behaviour and openness between organizations can result in reduced adaptive ability. Therefore, it is important to facilitate collaboration between organizations. We have studied the extent to which crisis managers are prepared to work with personnel and resources from organizations other than their own when responding to crises. An experiment was designed with four different organizations in Sweden, which involved decision making concerning whether the participants systematically favoured their own organization over others. Findings indicate that increasing familiarity and expectation of future cooperation with other organizations increased the likelihood that decision makers would be prepared to work with other organizations in joint crisis management.