ORGANIZATIONAL CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The crisis is a condition that represents a disruption of normal operations of an organization and affects its major goals. A crisis may happen due to mismanagement, negligence, economic volatility, technological failure, political and social changes, and natural disasters. Crisis management refers to the set of coordinated activities to prevent a crisis or ensure damage control. A great deal of research has been carried out to devise effective and efficient strategies for dealing with diverse types of crises in organizations. However, the existing literature still has a lot of room to address various crisis management aspects for public sector organizations. The main objective of this study is to examine the nature of crisis faced by public sector organizations and provide a conceptual framework with suitable and effective crisis management strategies and models. This is achieved by investigating four fundamental areas of crisis management in public organizations including nature of crises, critical factors involved, organizational leadership and extracting suitable contingency management strategies from real-life examples according to the size and scale of the crisis. The argumentative approach is followed to review a wide range of relevant literature, compare crisis management models and strategy, and evaluate the research questions. Finally, it is concluded that the role of leadership, effective communication within and outside the organization with stakeholders, and a healthy organizational culture are the most important elements in containing crisis situation even if limited resources are available. However, a reliable crisis management plan must exist and rehearsed in public sector organizations.