Organizational configurations in a crisis context: what archetypes in times of COVID-19 crisis?

Abstract

BACKGROUND: We only believe the components of our study, namely: the subject (the organizational configuration), the circumstance (COVID-19), and the context (Tunisia) together constitute the originality of our research. Indeed, to our knowledge, no study has been carried out so far on the typical configurations for managing the COVID-19 crisis in a Tunisian context. We think, therefore, that we are the first to do so. OBJECTIVE: In a context of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis which is currently affecting our planet and which has had a huge impact on all levels (health, economic and social), our research seeks make a further contribution to the study of organizational configurations or archetypes in the field of crisis management. More specifically, our research principally aims, on the one hand, to describe the forms taken by organizations when they are facing a crisis of great magnitude such as - the COVID-19 crisis - and on the other hand, to identify a taxonomy making it possible to highlight the recurring axes of action on which the actors rely to manage a crisis. METHODS: Our methodological framework is based on the phenomenological paradigm in the human sciences which integrates the meaning given by man to the world around him [1] and which takes into account the subjectivity of the actors. Our positioning in favor of the phenomenological paradigm leads to the adoption of a qualitative research method. At this level, we carried out twenty-four semi-structured interviews in twenty Tunisian companies that were able to resist during the pandemic COVID-19 crisis and have managed to last at least until the present day. RESULTS: We identified three archetypes on the basis of five organizational factors that we inspired from the onion model of [2] and qualified it as configuration “determinants”, namely: strategy, structure, culture, leadership, and people. These archetypes are: the humanist communitarian, the perfectionist mobilizer, and the incrementalist pragmatic. CONCLUSIONS: We therefore believe that our research has enriched the configurational perspective by defining archetypes capable of managing a major crisis such as the COVID-19 crisis. The archetypes thus identified in our study may constitute typical models to be followed by companies wishing to resist the health crisis that is not yet over and whose repercussions can last for a long time.