دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله مدیریت بحران یا سیستم پاسخ به بحران (نشریه امرالد 2006)

مدیریت بحران یا سیستم پاسخ به بحران؟ یک رویکرد مبتنی بر علم پیچیدگی در قبال بحران های سازمانی

Crisis management or crisis response system? A complexity science approach to organizational crises

Abstract

Purpose – To offer a complexity-informed framework for the design of an effective organizational crisis response system. Design/methodology/approach – A narrative analysis of the crisis response in a hotel chain facing a major food poisoning outbreak, seen from a complexity theory perspective. Data were collected through 17 in-depth interviews of persons involved in the crisis response and through analysis of secondary data. Findings – The analysis identified weaknesses in the chain’s crisis response and complexity theory provided a good theoretical foundation of the proposals to overcome them. Practical implications – Organizations should redefine the role of crisis management plans and crisis management teams. An effective crisis response should be viewed as a living (co-evolving) system within the organization. By adopting complexity principles the organization can make this system far more effective. Originality/value – The paper is among the very few that deal with crisis management from a complexity perspective.

1 Introduction

Complexity thinking is not new to organizational and business studies (a thorough literature review of the 1980s and the 1990s on complexity in management is offered by Maguire and McKelvey, 1999). Although there is no universal definition of what complexity science is, its principles have inspired many academics and practitioners in the field of business management and provided them with useful explanatory frameworks to understand the behaviour of organizations as complex systems (Mitleton-Kelly, 2004). The published research on complexity applications in business remains at a predominantly conceptual level (as the field is still in development) whereas increasing empirical research covers applications in specific sectors like healthcare organizations (Plsek and Wilson, 2001; Redfern and Christian, 2003; Begun et al., 2003) or management topics such as change management (for example, Beeson and Davis, 2000; Styhre, 2002; Smith, 2004, McMillan, 2005), organizational learning, innovation and knowledge management (Fonseca, 2001; Hall and Andriani, 2003; Harkema, 2003), supply chains and logistics (Wilding, 1998; Goldsmith et al., 2002), small business management (Fuller and Lewis, 2002; Mole, 2004), etc. One topic that has hitherto received little attention is the response to crisis situations. In the substantial crisis management (CM) literature there are only a few authors that use principles of complexity and chaos theories in their work but even they do not deal with organizational crises but with natural disasters (for example, Comfort, 1999), crisis communications (Murphy, 1996; Seeger, 2002) and marine accidents (Goulielmos, 2004). This paper aims to propose a complexity-informed framework for effective organizational crisis response.