Section: Organisational and Strategic Communication
CRISIS MANAGEMENT AS A BALANCING ACT: PARADOXES OF CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS
Mats HEIDE, Lund University
Charlotte SIMONSSON, Lund University
The aim of this paper is to examine crisis management in complex organizations, and to elucidate the importance of a strategic balancing between different tension fields. These tensions fields, or paradoxes, have clear implications for ideas of communication and communication practices within organizations, which in its turn, shows that crisis communication and crisis management are hard to separate. However, just as Gilpin and Murphy (2008), we prefer to use the term ‘crisis management’ rather than ‘crisis communication’ – primarily because the former puts a stronger focus on a strategic and holistic perspective which we put forward in this paper.
The paper is based on 20 interviews with persons involved in the formal crises organization within Skane University Hospital(SUS). SUS is a fairly new organization and can be understood as a product of the New Public Management-paradigm. This paradigm mirrors the myth of the supremacy of the private sector over public sector (Levy, 2010) and follows the axiom “big is beautiful” (Talbot & Johnson, 2007). SUS was founded in January 2010 after a politically forced merger between two hospitals located within a 20 kilometers range. SUS is a multi-professional organization with about 12 500 employees. SUS is definitely a complex organization (cf. Gilpin & Murphy, 2008), which was one reason for choosing it as an empirical case. We have also chosen SUS because it can be labelled as an HRO (higly reliable organization). In HROs a lot of effort is put in avoiding crisis – anticipation, since the effects of an crisis could be disastrous (Weick, 2011), and resilience (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). We believe that non- HROs can learn a lot from HRO when it comes to crisis management. Our initial studies show however that SUS organization only partially can be labeled as a HRO; the HRO aspects pertain primarily to the medical, daily activities.
When it comes to the overall crisis management at SUS we have found seven tension fields that we will discuss and exemplify: (1) permanent crisis state – rarely any ‘real’ crisis, (2) centralized – localized, (3) professiona – organizational, (4) formal structure/planning – informal/improvisation, (5) product/technical – culture/process, (6) information – meaning/understanding, (7) internal – external. These tension fields are somewhat paradoxical, since managers at SUS seem to understand the value of both ends. However, in practice one side tends to dominate – managers at SUS responsible of crisis management seem to focus on tactical, hands-on questions and a transmission-oriented communication view, whereas strategic considerations and sensemaking aspects are treated as “Teflon questions”; they are too complex to be dealt with and therefore often neglected – these questions do not “stick” in the organization. Alvesson and Sveningsson (2011) have found the same tendency at a pharmaceutical firm where managers tried to control the process in the laboratories through classic managerial ideals and tools such as structure, rules and technical operating models. Our intention is to discuss how complex organizations can improve crisis management through an ongoing activity of balancing between the identified tension fields.