Managing Complex Crises

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Organizations have worked over the years to develop efficiencies to their supply chains, which includes efforts to reduce waste, lower costs, consolidate suppliers and distributors, better manage costs of goods sold and inventory, develop efficiencies in packaging, storage, and shipping of product, as well as utilizing digital analytics to manage consumer choices and demands. These are all by-products of world-class manufacturing which have promoted systematic organizational and supply chain efficiencies. However, under economic shocks that are sustained over longer periods of time (e.g., Covid-19 Pandemic) and that affect supply chains from a variety of disruptions, a supply chain that is not prepared or adaptable may be broken or at a minimum weigh down the organization. Therefore, the ability to manage and control risk is a key aspect of effective supply chain management. However, the literature on pandemic risk mitigation is nascent. Thus, this paper offers a review of the extant literature, provides a strategic mitigation model covering five dimensions: leadership, preparedness, digitalization, resilience, and pivoting. These dimensions are designed to help organizations in the future to be more adaptive to events such as global pandemics and other large-scale disruptions and discuss implications for future research.</abstract>

Supply Chain Resilience in a Pandemic: The Need for Revised Contingency Planning

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The purpose of this paper is to present a knowledge management approach to complex crises, having as a reference the multiple crises generated by COVID-19, crises we are living with, and for which we cannot anticipate a specific end due to the knowledge absence concerning this complexity. A complex crisis is a system crisis that induces new crises in connected systems. The knowledge management approach shows that understanding complex crises and managing them needs an excellent understanding of these crises’ knowledge gaps and the knowledge dynamics phenomena able to describe their manifestation and evolution. There is no <italic>a priori</italic> knowledge or model to give us the key to coping with these crises and designing the best solutions for all the problems generated by them. The present research is based on qualitative research of the significant literature by using the Grounded Theory. The findings show that a knowledge management approach offers new insights into the complexity of these phenomena, which can be symbolized by the <italic>Black Swan</italic> metaphor defined by Nassim Taleb in his seminal book <italic>The Black Swan. The impact of the highly improbable</italic>.</abstract>

A Knowledge Management Approach to Complex Crises

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Customer knowledge management has begun to catch momentum due to de fact that companies started to understand the importance of customer knowledge on the overall customer and brand experience even though there is no appreciable consideration in this field of research. The business impact of COVID-19 and the crisis duration have seriously affected the execution of business and the expectations of customers, therefore many companies have to reconsider their communication actions and their offers, trying to find an empathic understanding of their customers based on classical data rather than data-driven by customer knowledge. This paper aims to help specialists to connect the points between brand experience and customer knowledge model, to understand the interconnections, composition, and framework of these conjunctions. The purpose of this study is to establish a consistent relation between brand experience and consumer knowledge by exploring the direct and indirect influence of comprehensive use of customer knowledge. An adjacent target of this study is to initiate a composed set of guidelines that will help specialists ensure the consistency of the brand experience providing consensus among practitioners in this new era of experience economy where too many brands offer a poor customer experience, even though most of them argue that experience management is their top priority.</abstract>

The Expanding Role of Customer Knowledge Management and Brand Experience during the Pandemic Crisis

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Food security is very important and is also prone to problems when faced with disaster situations, including diseases such as Covid-19 pandemic. The objectivity of this article is to highlight food security in relation to the availability of access to food sources so that it can meet basic or primary needs in Indonesia. An in-depth literature study with an epistemological positivism approach is needed to answer the problems that make the food crisis the main focus. To ensure food security in Indonesia, the government has prepared various strategies in three important agendas (emergency, temporary, and permanent) to monitor the stability of prices for basic necessities so that they do not skyrocket, increase national food production based on smallholder agriculture, and support small farmers. To achieve this, the Indonesian government has reallocated a larger budget to allocate it to seed assistance, labor-intensive programs, stabilization of food stocks and prices, paying attention to food distribution, and transportation. The implications are expected to make a significant contribution to other countries in anticipation of the food security crisis due to the impact of COVID-19.</abstract>

Food Security Management for Indonesia: The Strategy during the Covid-19 Pandemic

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The crisis caused by COVID-19, made us rethink our perception of the way of life. Traffic restrictions, isolation, quarantine, the need for social distance have generated new behavior by transferring null activities in the online environment. The advantage today is that the 21st century is characterized by the presence of information technology and its rapid development. The telecommute proposed by Nilles (1994), became in 2020 a very topical concept, due to the special situation in which the whole of humanity is. Although both employers and employees have refused the teleworking formula for a long time, it has now become the only possibility to maintain an acceptable level of activity. The rapid evolution of ITC technologies and applications, the entry on the labor market of the M generation have contributed to the increase of favorability for telework, in 2018 it being included in the Romanian legislation. The methodology for this article was to analyze the Romanian Classification of Activities in the National Economy (CAEN) to find out in which domains do Romanian SMEs prefer to activate and to find out the resistance to telecommuting as a way of work by finding out which of these economic sectors have implemented day to day teleworking long ago and which will. An empirical analysis of every domain was complemented by the survey results to verify to which extent telecommuting is feasible in Romanian SMEs, especially during and after the Coronavirus pandemic. It was necessary to analyze of Eurofound statistics regarding living and working during the COVID-19 pandemic to find out correlations and differences between the authors’ findings and the EU27 baseline.</abstract>

National University of Political Studies and Public Administration

Teleworking Perspectives for Romanian SMEs after the COVID-19 Pandemic

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Workplace absenteeism is a complex issue that can be caused by various factors which include job dissatisfaction, organizational environment, or personal problems. The study aims to create a brief profile of absenteeism in companies operating in Iasi in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. A quantitative study was conducted to shape the profile of absenteeism, using descriptive statistics and correlation analysis. Findings revealed that employees working in Iasi are prone to absent as a result of attitudinal factors, in particular, autonomy linked to decision making. Organizational factors did not have a significant contribution regarding absenteeism because managers offered support when employees faced difficulties. Working for a living was the personal factor that stood out; this thing being mainly influenced by the current pandemic period. The stress of being laid off or displaced led many employees to ignore professional development. COVID-19 influenced the employees’ decision to miss a workday, the fear of getting infected, or the stress related to the pandemic outlined a behavior known as presenteeism or digital absenteeism for those that worked from home. Implementing social distancing rules prevented physical absenteeism, employees perceived the workplace as a safe environment.</abstract>

Factors Contributing to Work-Related Absenteeism during the COVID-19 Pandemic

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Managerial decisions have a particularly important role in organizational life. Often the organization survives and develops due to good decisions, made by managers at the right time. There are also times when the lack of an adequate managerial response, at the right time and at the right time, can lead the organization to a less desired direction of development, or even to the bankruptcy of the organization. To understand which of the decisions are the most efficient and appropriate to the development of their organizations, managers must first know the fundamentals of decision management. The purpose of this article is primarily to present the main features of the decision-making process, as well as the particularities and specificities of the decision. Secondly, the emphasis will be on the presentation of theoretical notions on the identification of the characteristics of organizations in a process of change, in a world subject to the phenomenon of globalization. The typologies of decisions in conditions of certainty and uncertainty will be analyzed, according to how aspects related to the management of decisions in conditions of risk will be discussed. Thirdly, the opportunity to manage organizational change through projects will be discussed, as they will play the role of real vehicles of change. The case study presented in this article highlights an approach focused on a comparative analysis, between the modalities of managerial response to the economic and financial crisis in 2010-2012 and the managerial response to the crisis generated by COVID-19, as it was felt during the year 2020. The idea behind this comparative approach between responses and managerial actions in the two types of crises is that there is a common action pattern of these managers. It is also desired to identify distinct elements and particularities of the economic-financial crisis from 2010-2012, as well as distinct elements related to the particularities of the crisis induced by the effects of COVID-19. In the concluding part of this chapter, we want to highlight some possible types of business lessons that could be learned for the future by Romanian managers from the crisis induced by COVID-19, as well as identifying possible directions for action for the future.</abstract>

Challenges of the Managerial Decision in the Context of the Economic Crisis Induced by the Effects of COVID-19

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The world is going through a pandemic that is spreading and affecting all parts of society. Businesses throughout Romania have been affected and many are in a state of crisis because of the virus. There is a general fear spread among the population since the government has implemented restrictions for both companies and people. This crisis is impacting restaurants all across the country. Even though a large number of restaurants are going out of business it is also clear that some prevail and some even do better than before the crisis. Previous studies conducted during a crisis showed that some businesses were more resilient than others due to the successful integration of crisis management and strategic planning. This study aims to analyze the integration between crisis management and strategic planning of four different restaurants by focusing on their leadership and culture. The purpose of this analysis is to evaluate up to what extend the restaurants are working towards resilience by conducting interviews with the leader of the restaurants and co-workers. This study showed that the crisis is changing the ways small restaurants are acting and tend to become more resilient as the crisis progress and in the face of an even more possible financial crisis. Moreover, this study showed new opportunities such a crisis brings and how small restaurants are adopting them.</abstract>

Crisis Management and Resilience for Restaurants in Romania during the COVID-19 Pandemic

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The purpose of this paper is to construct a typology of actors in the knowledge economy, based on the specificity of their activities. So far, almost all the researchers focused their interests on organizations and their management in the knowledge economy ignoring the actors who perform and make the progress of the new economy based primarily on intangible resources. The main criterion for this typology is the positioning of these actors with respect to knowledge, as an intangible resource of any economic activity. The whole spectrum of this typology is defined by the end actors who are the composers and the consumers. The composers create knowledge and transform personal knowledge into organizational knowledge, while the consumers are those who use it. In between, there are owners, administrators, and performers. As an extension, we may include in this typology the citizens as end possible knowledge users. Also, we perform an analysis of the characteristics of all these actors with respect to values, objectives, methods, and results. The contribution of the present paper results from the new perspective we offer in understanding the mechanisms and the dynamics of the knowledge economy.</abstract>

Actors in the Knowledge Economy: A Typology

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Although invisible to the individual, knowledge flows are found within any team or department within the organization, whether or not they are used intentionally. Thus, in an organization with an emphasis on knowledge, knowledge flows become the main mechanism for the success of the organization. However, various barriers to knowledge flows often emerge that can make these flows difficult or even stop from their natural course through the organization, often directly affecting the intellectual capital of the organization. For this reason, many organizations are unable to reach their full potential despite efforts to manage knowledge flows effectively. This study aims to outline the main factors hindering the knowledge flows within IT organizations operating in Iasi (Romania) and to analyze statistical links between these factors. For this purpose, a quantitative method was selected, using descriptive analysis, factor analysis, correlation coefficients, and a regression model. The results obtained by this study show that factors acting as barriers to knowledge flows found in the literature cannot be generalized across all organizations. Thus, the way these factors are affecting knowledge flows varies from one organization to another depending on the industry in which they operate.</abstract>

Knowledge Flows Barriers: An Exploratory Study in the IT Industry

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 12 (2024): Issue 1 (March 2024)

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Volume 8 (2020): Issue 4 (December 2020)

Volume 8 (2020): Issue 3 (September 2020)

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Volume 8 (2020): Issue 1 (March 2020)

Volume 7 (2019): Issue 4 (December 2019)

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Volume 7 (2019): Issue 2 (June 2019)

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Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy

Aims and Scope  The aim of Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy (MDKE) is to address in an interdisciplinary framework the dynamics of the organization management and its strategic approaches by considering the imperatives and the contingencies of the new societal and economical environments at a local, national or global scale, with a special emphasis on emerging economies.  MDKE aims to foster meaningful academic discussions and to support the exchange of ideas on principles, strategies, models, techniques, methodologies, and applications of management science in all the important fields of interest.  The first issue of MDKE was published in April 2013, both online and in print. The journal was initiated by Prof. Dr. Constantin Brãtianu from the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Prof. Dr. Florina Pînzaru and Prof. Dr. Alexandra Zbuchea, from the Faculty of Management, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (SNSPA), Bucharest, Romania. Starting with 2015, the journal is published exclusively online, 4 issues annually. Since 2019 the journal is published in cooperation with de Gruyter, on the Sciendo platform.  As intended from its very beginning, the journal is interested in research that crosses the boundaries of single academic subjects stimulating interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. Topics can cover research, non-exclusively, in the following domains: management, strategic management, innovation management, change management, international management, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, leadership and governance, knowledge management, brand management and consumer behavior, business, business process optimization, corporate social responsibility, financial and economic management, e-business and digitalization, and sustainability management.  Types of Submissions  The journal welcomes three types of submissions, namely: conceptual papers, research articles and literature reviews, all of them being subject to a double-blind peer review.  Description of the Peer Review Process  Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy is a double-blind peer-reviewed academic publication. Peer review is a key element of scientific publishing, and it serves several main purposes: to filter the research to select the most relevant studies; to improve research quality, by highlighting key points and correcting errors; to help the authors to improve their work, through offering specific comments on the key aspects of a research article: title, abstract, keywords, content and analysis, discussions, conclusions and references.  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All authors are asked to comply with the Article Template requirements before submitting their articles, but all accepted articles still require minor alterations in format and style. Once the editorial team agrees on the final version, a final copy of the article will be sent to the authors for approval and then will be sent to the Publishing House to ensure the online publication. After that moment, the papers cannot be altered in any way. For further details, please see Author guidelines page.  Manuscript Submission  Authors should submit their manuscript in a MSWord format, adapted for the Windows operating system and DOC or RTF file to the Editor via the online platform. No hard copies are required.  When submitting an article, no author identification has to be provided in the paper uploaded initially on the platform. If the paper is finally accepted for publication, the final submission should comply with the MDKE Author Guidelines. Please note that submissions not complying with these guidelines will be rejected on formal grounds.  Authors should register and log-in prior to submission. When registering on the platform, we recommend the authors to register themselves as readers as well. This will enable them to easily have access to all the issues of the journal.  By submitting the paper, the authors certify that the study proposed is their own, that they hold the rights to present the information included in the paper and that they give the publication rights to the publishers of the journal. All papers are checked with anti-plagiarism software.  Alongside the manuscript in a MSWord format, two other documents filled and signed should be uploaded: MDKE Originality Statement and Copyright Agreement and Open Access License.  Submission Management  Each submission is acknowledged by one of the members of the editorial team and then the pre-selection begins. At this stage, the members of the editorial team choose to either reject the article directly or to send it to the reviewers for a thorough review. The grounds for immediate dismissal (desk rejection) of a manuscript are the following:   Plagiarism  The standard of English is not considered to be good enough for publication. If English is not the first language of the authors, they should make sure the paper is proofread by a professional or a native speaker.  The manuscript does not fit with the scope of the journal or does not follow rigorously the author’s guidelines and paper template.  The data presented in the article are outdated (either the bibliography is not up-to-date or the research materials are too old).  Each author receives notice of the final decision made by the editorial team which can be of two kinds: a) decision to include the article in the review process or b) decision to reject the article followed by the list of reasons that have led to that decision. Authors whose articles have been rejected for reasons other than fraud can choose to resubmit their work for a second time. If after the second try the article is still not considered a good fit for the journal, then the author is prohibited from resubmitting the work again.  If the article passes this pre-selection then it is sent for peer-review to two professionals with experience in the field. This stage lasts for maximum four weeks, depending on the complexity of the article and the availability of experts in the field. The final decision of the peer-review process can be as follows:    Accepted with no changes – When the paper satisfies all qualitative and quantitative requirements.  Accepted with minor changes – This decisions signal that the article in its present form, with minor modifications is suitable for publication. The authors received the decision followed by the suggestions of the peer reviewers and their submission, after alterations, will step on to the next stage.  Accepted with major changes – Most of the articles submitted to MDKE fall in this category. These are articles which show promise, but they need further elaborate work. Thus, each reviewer sends his or her recommendations and the authors are encouraged to revise their articles, answering to each of these recommendations.  Rejected – This decision signals that there are major concerns over the quality of the scientific materials presented in the paper and that the reviewers consider there is no chance in improving the article in such a way as to become a suitable candidate for publication in MDKE.   After formatting, all articles set to be included in the following issue will appear online according to the publication schedule.  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Please pay attention to all the information on the website and be aware that affiliations of authors and reviewers are public on the platform. By submitting the required information, the authors implicitly agree to make public the data. 

Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy

Volume 8 (2020): Issue 4 (December 2020)

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