Abstract
This article presents a typology of temporal organizational responses to crises in public perception aimed at examining the ability of organizations to restructure in order to cope with acute crisis management challenges. The typology is based on organizations’ capacities to launch crisis management strategies and adapt their managerial and operational levels to deal with crises. According to the typology, the Fully Adapting Organization manages to adapt both its strategy and its managerial and operational levels to deal with the crisis. The Semi-Adapting Organization changes its strategy but lacks the capacity to change managerial and operational levels according to the new strategy. The Non-Adapting Organization does not grasp the importance of strategy change in the first place. Based on three inductive case studies the study concludes that organizational culture plays an important role in this process where the Semi and the Non-Adapting organizations were dominated by strong expert cultures that proved to be less inclined to change. In contrast, the Fully Adapting Organization had deliberately fostered an organizational culture in which flexibility was a cornerstone.
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Notes
Schein understands organizational culture as consisting of three basic layers: artifacts (visible structures and processes that are part of an organizations physical environment); espoused values (referring to explicit statements on organizations’ strategies, goals and aspirations); and basic underlying assumptions (the core of organizational culture, which refers to unconscious, taken for granted assumptions, beliefs and perceptions that guides organizational members in their everyday work) (Schein, 1992, pp. 16–27). Taken together, the three divisions create a certain organizational culture, which makes organizations fulfill their goals. Schein’s notion of organizational culture has proven to be a valuable construct to scholars with an interest in issues related to organizational change (Denison and Mishra, 1995; Küng-Shankleman, 2000; Lurie and Riccucci, 2003). In this study we relate Schein’s concepts of espoused values and basic underlying assumptions to organizational strategy and adaptability.
Seven interviews were conducted at the Fully Adapting Organization, 18 at the Semi-Adapting Organization, and eight at the Non-Adapting Organization.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency for financial support of this research, Kerstin Castenfors for collecting part of the empirical data for one of the case studies, and Dominic Elliott of University of Liverpool and Paul 't Hart of Australian National University and Utrecht University for helpful comments on a previous version of this article.
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Deverell, E., Olsson, EK. Organizational culture effects on strategy and adaptability in crisis management. Risk Manag 12, 116–134 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/rm.2009.18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/rm.2009.18