How managers are critical for largescale public crisis management-lessons from India

Abstract

In a world fraught with uncertainty, unforeseen large-scale events have the power to bring entire economies to a standstill. In this article we argue that how a country handles a public crisis in the wake of such uncontrollable external pressures, depends critically on the country’s managers. Through careful analysis of large-scale crisis situations that have hit multiple geographies in the world, such as the Tsunami of 2004 and COVID-2019, we identify four generic capabilities that are necessary to manage crises of such magnitudes: (i) Production and Procurement capability, (ii) Coordination or Network Orchestration Capability (iii) Distribution & Logistics Capability and (iv) Local Governance Capability. Since not all four capabilities are likely to be present in a single organizational form, we propose that handling a large-scale crisis requires hybrid forms of organization that combine the strengths of firms, governments, and NGOs (or community organizations). We refute the view of the manager’s peripheral role in crisis management, held by most classical theories of crisis management. To empirically support our conceptual findings above, and to gain a broader view of how major firms responded to the Covid-19 lockdown in India, we analysed the Twitter feed of the major Indian corporations listed in India’s National Stock Exchange. This analysis revealed that, post lockdown the discussion centered around distribution of food and other supplies, as well as provision of healthcare facilities, which were found to be major challenges during the Covid-19 lockdown period in India. We expanded our analysis further by collecting and reviewing several articles from business press and academic literature. A deeper examination and a careful search in international and Indian business press revealed that, managers from for-profit firms did play a significant and central role in management of Covid-19 crisis during the 3 month lockdown period, by making use of the above capabilities and by actively coordinating with other organizational forms, especially in case of India. Based on the Indian experience of managing the COVID-19 crisis, we propose a generic framework to help managers in orchestrating a collaboration between various organizational forms to meet the immediate needs of a largescale crisis in an agile fashion.