Resilience in the face of uncertainty: early lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

The transboundary dynamics of COVID-19 present an unprecedented test of organisational resilience. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS), a talisman of collective fortitude against disease and illness, has struggled to cope with inadequate provision of virus tests, ventilators, and personal protective equipment needed to fight the pandemic. In this paper, we reflect on the historic dynamics and strategic priorities that have undermined the NHS's attempts to navigate these troubled times. We invoke the organisational resilience literature to address 'the good, the bad and the ugly' of preparedness in readiness and response to the current pandemic. In particular, we draw on Meyer's (1982) seminal work on 'adaptation to jolts', excavating current preparedness failings. We argue an overreliance on perceived efficiency benefits of 'lean production' and 'just in time' continuity planning superseded strategic redundancy and slack in the system. This strategic focus was not simply the result of a failure in foresight, but rather a failure to act adaptively on knowledge of the known threats and weaknesses spotlighted by earlier projections of an inevitable pandemic threat. In conclusion, we consider how the UK Government and NHS must now undergo a phase of 'readjustment' in Meyer's terms, in light of these failings. We suggest that independent responsibility for national future preparedness should be handed to the NHS free from political interference. This would operate under the umbrella of a national emergency preparedness, resilience and response public body, enshrined in law, and similar in governance to the current Bank of England. This will help ensure that foresight is accompanied by durability and fortitude in safeguarding the UK against future pandemic threats

Developing Leadership for Creative Efforts: A Preface

Michael D. Mumford is the George Lynn Cross distinguished research professor of psychology at the University of Oklahoma where he directs the Center for Applied Social Research. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Georgia in 1983 in the fields of industrial and organizational psychology and psychometrics. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 3, 5, 10, 14), the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and the American Psychological Society. He has written more than 270 articles on leadership, creativity, innovation, planning, and ethics. He has served as senior editor of The Leadership Quarterly, and he sits on the editorial boards of the Creativity Research Journal, The Journal of Creative Behavior, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and Ethics and Behavior, among other journals. He has served as principal investor on grants totaling more than US$30 million from the National Science Foundation, The National Institute of Health, the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, and the Department of State. He is a recipient of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Organizing to counter terrorism: sensemaking amidst dynamic complexity

publication-status: Acceptedtypes: ArticlePre-print draft (version 1). ‘The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Human Relations September 2013 66(9): 1201–1223, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © [The Author]Organizations increasingly find themselves contending with circumstances that are suffused with dynamic complexity. So how do they make sense of and contend with this? Using a sensemaking approach, our empirical case analysis of the shooting of Mr Jean Charles de Menezes shows how sensemaking is tested under such conditions. Through elaborating the relationship between the concepts of frames and cues, we find that the introduction of a new organizational routine to anticipate action in changing circumstances leads to discrepant sensemaking. This reveals how novel routines do not necessarily replace extant ones but instead, overlay each other and give rise to novel, dissonant identities which in turn can lead to an increase in equivocality rather than a reduction. This has important implications for sensemaking and organizing amidst unprecedented circumstances

More than a cognitive experience: unfamiliarity, invalidation, and emotion in organizational learning

Literature on organizational learning (OL) lacks an integrative framework that captures the emotions involved as OL proceeds. Drawing on personal construct theory, we suggest that organizations learn where their members reconstrue meaning around questions of strategic significance for the organization. In this 5-year study of an electronics company, we explore the way in which emotions change as members perceive progress or a lack of progress around strategic themes. Our framework also takes into account whether OL involves experiences that are familiar or unfamiliar and the implications for emotions. We detected similar patterns of emotion arising over time for three different themes in our data, thereby adding to OL perspectives that are predominantly cognitive in orientation

What lies beneath? The role of informal and hidden networks in the management of crises

Crisis management research traditionally focuses on the role of formal communication networks in the escalation and management of organisational crises. Here, we consider instead informal and unobservable networks. The paper explores how hidden informal exchanges can impact upon organisational decision-making and performance, particularly around inter-agency working, as knowledge distributed across organisations and shared between organisations is often shared through informal means and not captured effectively through the formal decision-making processes. Early warnings and weak signals about potential risks and crises are therefore often missed. We consider the implications of these dynamics in terms of crisis avoidance and crisis management

Annotation management: a Group decision support system for nurses tasks

International audienceWe develop a 5-year empirical investigation that is giving us broad and deep insights to characterise activity management in the palliative ward of an oncology hospital, and offer effective support for group decision-making and collaborative activity of caregivers. Following this observation period, we propose a software prototype based upon annotations in which dealing with patients’ state and evolution is a complex organisational task. We based our conception of an annotation tool on the observations of the rich writing practices of medical professionals. We rely on the innovative strategy of intermediate management to introduce a new technology able to bridge heterogeneous, valuable data flows that addresses both management support and activity support in a single tool

Denying What Workers Believe Are Unethical Workplace Requests: Do Workers Use Moral, Operational, or Policy Justifications Publicly?

This message-production experiment demonstrates workers’ tendency to use organizational policy justifications when publicly denying what they privately believe are unethical requests. Working adults (N = 234) responded to an unethical request from a supervisor, coworker, or subordinate. Participants avoided using explicitly moralized justifications for their noncompliance publicly and thus engaged in issue crafting. Specifically, content and statistical analyses revealed that (a) most participants invoked policy justifications to deny requests and (b) differences in hierarchical relationships were not significantly associated with policy justification frequency. These dynamics afford important face-saving functions but hold implications for the moral learning capacity of organizations. The essay concludes with implications for crafting organizational ethics policy.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Individual leader to interdependent leadership: A case study in leadership development and tripartite evaluation

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2013 Sage Publications.The Problem - In this case study we see a move away from orthodox views of school leadership as “headship” to a more contemporary model of educational leadership wherein we note a departure from functional, curricula-based school leadership toward more human resource development (HRD) approaches. The aim of this study was to consider the effectiveness of an educational development program for middle leaders within an educational establishment. The Solution - We examined the impact of a bespoke higher education leadership development intervention in Leadership (and Change) on the formation and cohesiveness of a newly formed innovative leadership structure. The Stakeholders - The leadership development intervention was designed through a tripartite collaboration including a university, senior school leaders, and staff. The intervention was designed to shift leadership from individual leader agency to interdependent human leadership agency. Through tripartite evaluation we uncover leadership development praxis that transcends the boundaries of conventional educational leadership and reemphasizes the benefits of bridging the academic/practitioner divide and the application of theory to praxis