Organizational response to a major crisis

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. 10; 10; 10; 10; 10; 10; 10; Findings Surviving a global crisis often depends on a firm’s ability to become more flexible. This can be achieved by adapting current business models to enable more innovative approaches to cost control, investment and revenue generation during the crisis period and beyond. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Remote Working for Sustainability of Organization during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Mediator-Moderator Role of Social Support

Remote working became a widespread business practice during the COVID-19 pandemic as an organizational response to protect employees’ health and maintain business continuity. The aim of this paper is to reveal the role of social support in the relationship among NWHI, NHWI and loneliness, and work engagement and job performance. The study respondents were employees with a remote working status in Serbian companies, and a total of 226 valid surveys were collected. The PLS-SEM approach was deployed to test the hypothesized relationship between named variables. A standard bootstrapping procedure was used to reveal direct and indirect effects among latent variables. Results indicate a strong and positive direct association between social support and work engagement and job performance, while mediation and moderation of the role of social support were mostly confirmed but with some results opposite to what was expected. Social support was not able to buffer a negative home–work interaction and loneliness within remote working. The study offers insight into the role of social support and recommendations for managing the antecedents and consequences of remote working, with the aim to determine a sustainable model for extensive application, not only during the COVID-19 pandemic, but in regular times.

Turning visions into results: unraveling the distinctive paths of leading with vision and autonomy to goal achievement

PurposeLeading with vision while granting employees autonomy is one effective organizational response to the demands of a dynamic external environment. The former is thought to align followers' behavior by providing guidance, the latter to increase variance in their behavior by relinquishing control; both exert beneficial but distinct effects on organizational performance. What has remained uncharted heretofore is how these leader behaviors shape their followers' cognition and, subsequently, yield improvements in performance. The authors argue that a leader's vision communication transforms followers' cognitive representation of their work. This not only enables them to specify their goals in alignment with the vision (goal clarity) but also to locate the meaning of their work within the bigger picture of the vision (construal level). By contrast, perceived autonomy in terms of power-sharing might directly affect followers' work engagement more narrowly.Design/methodology/approachThe authors tested the model on a sample of 408 employees from eleven enterprises of a holding company. In the survey, employees reported perceived vision communication and autonomy provided by their leader. Furthermore, the authors assessed the employees' goal attainment. To capture how employees represent their daily work activities, the authors measured their construal level and their goal clarity.FindingsThe results show that both perceived vision communication and granted autonomy improve employees' goal achievement. Moreover, two processes mediate the relationship between vision communication and goal achievement in followers: first, specifying goals in terms of clarity; second, composing a higher-level mental construal of their work. In contrast, no mediation of empowering leader behaviors was found.Originality/valueBetter goal achievement through visionary leadership is therefore achieved through cognitive alignment of followers, while leader-granted autonomy acts as a motivational tool directly on performance.

Resilient Organizations for River Restoration: The Case of Two Colorado River Sub-Basin Recovery Programs

This study characterizes the resilience of organizations undertaking river basin governance and recovery. The Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program (UCREFRP) and the Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Program (LCR-MSCP) are defined in this study as polycentric organizations nested within larger institutional mechanisms governing the Colorado River Basin. This study utilizes an environmental disturbance-organizational response framework to characterize organizational resilience—and uses attitudinal diversity (characterized by attitudes toward agendas) as the measurable metric. Environmental disturbances are defined as either press or pulse and categorized as either institutional or biophysical in nature. Four types of attitudinal diversity metrics are utilized—supportive, clarifying, conditional, and critical. Results indicate that institutional press and pulse events generated anticipatory resilience capabilities along with some adaptive capabilities for the organizations. However, the biophysical press and pulse events only reveal coping capabilities and very little adaptive capabilities. With the recent Colorado River shortage declaration, it is critical for the programs to build anticipatory as well as adaptive capabilities for optimal response to biophysical press events.

Haunted Across the Political Spectrum: The Specter of Communism in Two Midcentury American Organizations

Organizations operating in midcentury America experienced a period of relative economic prosperity and global power. While political tensions existed between the United States and the Soviet Union since the culmination of the World War II, when the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test in 1949 and then successfully launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, these political tensions became more pressing concerns to American organizations. In fact, the perceived existential threat posed by communism became an observable rhetorical justification for organization and action within the United States. Through the use of corpus linguistics techniques, a comparative analysis was conducted on the foundational documents of the rightwing, John Birch Society and the leftwing, Students for a Democratic Society. Relative word frequencies, collocations, concordancing and statistical analyses were conducted around the use and context of the keyword communism. The results suggest that while these radical and reactionary groups perceived a common threat, multifinality exists in terms of organizational response. This insight is useful to those engaged in strategy development and rhetoric for political and business organizations.

Why Zoom Is Not Doomed Yet: Privacy and Security Crisis Response in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic brought Zoom explosive growth and a major privacy and security crisis in March 2020. This research advances a producer’s perspective that directs attentions to institutional and organizational actors and draws on theories of privacy management and organizational crisis communication to examine Zoom’s response to its privacy and security crisis. We primarily use data from 14 weekly Ask Eric Anything webinars from April 8 to July 15, 2020 to illustrate the strategies of Zoom’s crisis response, especially organizational representation, the contours of its analytic account acknowledging and reducing responsibility, and patterns of corrective and preventive action for user education and product improvement. Results demonstrate the usefulness of the producer’s perspective and shed light on how Zoom navigated the privacy and security crisis through mobilizing networks of executives, advisors, consultants, and clients for expertise, endorsement, and collaboration. Moreover, its response strategies have built on and contributed to Zoom’s organizational mission and culture, reframing the crisis as a growth opportunity for prioritizing privacy and security rather than mere growing pains. Zoom’s nimble, reasonable, collaborative, interactive and curated organizational response to its privacy and security crisis as an unintended consequence of its sudden rise to prominence amid a global pandemic offers a useful model for tech firms’ crisis response at a crucial moment for the tech industry around the world. Implications are relevant to understanding the socio-technical and economic consequences of this ongoing global pandemic.

Responses to corporate governance code: evidence from a longitudinal study

Drawing upon neo-institutional theory as the perspective for research on corporate governance, we present the results of empirical studies on compliance with best practice codes. We view the declarations of conformity as the organizational response to institutional pressure and address questions on (1) how companies respond to recommendations on board best practice and (2) how these reactions evolve over time. The study employs the mixed method approach and is based on a time-series sample of conformity declarations published by 126 companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange during the period 2006–2019. Descriptive statistics indicate an increase in the number of complying companies, an improvement in compliance quality and the growing length of conformity declarations. In the content analysis we identify two main reaction strategies (acceptance and rejection) with seven selected responses. We discuss the contribution to the existing literature on reactions to new practices in corporate governance.

Advanced Robotics as a Support in Healthcare Organizational Response. A COVID-19 Pandemic case

The use of robotics is becoming widespread in healthcare. However, little is known about how robotics can affect the relationship with patients in epidemic emergency response or how it impacts clinicians in their organization and work. As a hospital responding to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic “ASST dei Sette Laghi” (A7L) in Varese, Italy, had to react quickly to protect its staff from infection while coping with high budgetary pressure as prices of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) increased rapidly. In response, it introduced six semi-autonomous robots to mediate interactions between staff and patients. Thanks to the cooperation of multiple departments, A7L implemented the solution in less than 10 weeks. It reduced risks to staff and outlay for PPE. However, the characteristics of the robots affected their perception by healthcare staff. This case study reviews critical issues faced by A7L in introducing these devices and recommendations for the path forward.

Freedom behind bars: the central role of emotions in naturalizing an analogy for social change

In this paper we examine how a socially innovative solution to a complex social problem is able to overcome entrenched disadvantage and division and sustain itself within an existing institution. We explore how a rugby team in a high-security prison in Argentina has become an organizational response that substantially transformed prisoners’ lives in and out of jail, allowing inmates to reclaim many critical aspects of their humanity and dramatically reducing recidivism. We examine rugby as an analogy for new models of behaviors and identities in the context of extreme disadvantage, and surface the specific emotional work required to make the analogy generative. The findings from our in-depth case study reveal three reinforcing mechanisms in the workings of an analogy - resonating, resignifying, and collective generativity - and in doing so provide a novel crescive model of how analogies may sustain change emotionally, cognitively and behaviorally over time, and ultimately achieve positive transformational effects in extreme social contexts.