The Combat against COVID-19 in Portugal, Part II: How Governance Reinforces Some Organizational Values and Contributes to the Sustainability of Crisis Management

Abstract

The new coronavirus caught governments all over the world completely unaware, which led to a set of different and sometimes not quite articulated responses, leading to some undesirable results. The present investigation is based on three objectives: to assess the conditions “before” and “during” the combat and the expected consequences “after” the outbreak, by having as reference the Portuguese case; to offer a framework of the input factors to crisis management in the pandemic context; and to contribute to the crisis management literature, in the public sector from a perspective of collaborative and multi-level governance. This research is inductive and follows a quantitative approach, with the proposal and testing of a crisis management COVID-19 structural model. The Portuguese case presented in this paper suggests a robust and valid crisis management model. This model may be well translated for other countries with cultural proximity to the Portuguese culture, for instance, Portuguese speaking countries such as Brazil, or geographical proximity to Portugal such as, for instance, Spain. The authors, nevertheless, advise readers to exert some restraint on the extrapolation of the results, as governance systems and traditions can vary a good deal from country to country. Future studies should focus on the importance of coordination as one of the most important areas in crisis management, narrowing the scope of analysis from the broad, macro understanding of the research problem presented on this paper.