Organization Development Journal

Letter From the Guest Editor

Reshaping Crisis Management: The Challenge for Organizational Design

A new approach to crisis management is emerging which progresses beyond a purely reactive response and creates fresh opportunities for improved organizational development. This paper outlines the traditional event approach to crisis management, which focuses on preparing for and responding to a major adverse occurrence, and discusses the new process approach, which reshapes crisis management within a broader continuum of management activity. Crisis prevention instead of just crisis response n...

Crisis Management in Institutional Healthcare Settings: From Punitive to Emancipatory Solutions

Sometimes inefficient management of crises may lead to remedies that prove to be as problematic as the ills for which a solution is sought. Usually, this discrepancy arises from a limited analysis of the crisis, the objective of which is to preserve institutional legitimacy, regardless the roots of the failure. But the roots of a crisis may be found in profound organizational mechanisms generally permitting organizations to function normally on a daily basis. A more substantive investigation ...

Psychosocial Safety Climate, Workplace Bullying, and Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress

Although not typical organizational crises, chronic stressors like workplace bullying have the capacity to shatter assumptions and create significant disruption. This paper reviews literature linking organizational climate, workplace bullying, and posttraumatic stress symptoms, and presents a research case study that explores hypotheses raised by the review. Results showed: (1) that workplace bullying impacted upon posttraumatic stress symptoms; and that psychosocial organizational climate wa...

Threats of Violence in the Workplace

This article describes a model to think about threats of violence in businesses. Threats are examined based on communication, credibility, lethality, process, specificity, and type. Business leadership can use this model to understand threats in order to make decisions about what if any actions need to be taken. Suggestions are also given about rating the severity of the threat.

Organizational Perception Management: A Framework to Overcome Crisis Events

Crisis events can threaten organizations through each stage of their life cycle. Further, research suggests that crises are happening more regularly and across a wider range of issues (Hart et al., 2001). Thus, it is important to understand the steps that organizations can take to mitigate loss due to crisis events, as well as speed recovery efforts. This paper examines how perception management can influence the speed and degree to which an organization recovers from a crisis. We highlight t...

Crisis Management in Public School Districts

School districts, as public institutions serving kindergarten through high school students and their communities, can improve their crisis-ready status by strengthening crisis response strategies. Crisis management offers strategies and processes for preparing for, preventing, responding to, managing, recovering from, and learning from crisis events. Proactive steps can be taken to improve crisis readiness before, during, and after a crisis event. In the crisis-rich environment of the new dec...

Crisis Communications Management 2.0: Organizational Principles to Manage Crisis in an Online World.1

The Internet has revolutionised crisis communications management. It is the channel through which traditional crises have found new ways to spread virally; it has brought new potential scenarios to plan for, and new forms of power configuration in the communication model, among other changes. This article examines how the Internet has introduced significant shifts in the way organizations must monitor, plan and respond to crisis situations, while the basic objectives and principles of crisis ...

Earthquake in Haiti: A Failure in Crisis Management?

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti provides a real-life framework that highlights the political realities of responding to mass emergencies and also reveals some of the limitations of the extant literature on crisis management in facilitating global response in the immediate aftermath of major disasters. Recently, researchers in the field of emergency management and disasters (e.g., Boin, 2009; Drabek, 2007; Shalev et al., 2000) have outlined issues that need to be addressed by crisis managers, pol...

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