Crisis Process Management: How to Improve Organizational Resilience?

Abstract

Crisis process management refers to the process in which organizational leaders take actions and communicate to reduce the possibility of crisis, minimize the damage caused by the crisis and try to rebuild order after the crisis. In contrast, organizational resilience refers to the process in which an organization makes plans to cope with crises and adversity, responds to crises, recovers and even improves after crises through the use of organizational capabilities and resources. From the perspective of process view, this study regards crisis management as a process to improve organizational resilience. We adopt the process view of crisis, and divide the process of crisis management into four phases, that is, before the crisis, early stage of crisis, middle stage of crisis, and later stage of crisis. By reviewing the crisis management literature, this study has identified four research themes relevant to organizational resilience: high-reliability organizations, incident command system, crisis leadership and crisis learning, which are respectively emphasized in different phases of crisis management when taking the characteristics and the focus of different crisis management phases into consideration. Based on this, we try to construct connections between the theoretical concepts with the practice of enterprises in order to promote researches on organizational resilience and crisis management and provide insights for crisis management practices. Through analyzing the specific practice of Huawei, we have provided a process model of crisis management, consisting of two dimensions of bouncing back for surviving and bouncing forward for thriving. We have thus analyzed the role of crisis process management in building a resilient organization, and ultimately formed a theoretical system and practical framework to help enterprises improve organizational resilience and crisis management ability.