An Empirical Study On The Influencing Mechanism Of The Crisis Leadership And Crisis Management Performance:a Stakeholder Perspective

Facing the dynamic and complex environment, the crisis for organizations is no longer exception, but the new reality, whose nature and feature has profoundly changed. Correspondingly, the traditional thinking and methods for crisis management is out of accord with the times. Facing new questions, there are only old methods, which make cries aggravated. So, we need a breakthrough both in theory and practice. This paper suggests an innovative approach to measure Crisis Context from the perspective of Stakeholders. From theory, we emphasize the two way interaction between organization and stakeholders, instead of the traditional one-way action from the organization perspective. From practice, this research will provide all kinds of possible scenarios for the operation model from the stakeholders’ point of view. In crisis, the right thing is selecting the core stakeholder in the relational clutter, while the response strategy is just doing thing right.Firstly, this paper use of theory deduction to development the new comprehension of Crisis and Crisis Management based on stakeholders. Secondly, we explore the theoretical framework by qualitative research methods, using 60 interview data. From the qualitative research, we gain three main categories, including crisis situation, crisis leadership and stakeholders. Based on the framework, this paper empirically studies the effect of crisis leadership and behavior characteristics of stakeholders on the crisis management result. In the end, this paper verifies the importance of core stakeholder in the crisis management, based on 93 crisis cases from 2004 to 2013.The main conclusions of this paper includes:(1) Crisis is a wicked problem, rather than a tamed question. Its complication is not easy to read. We define the crisis situation as the relationship structure between stakeholders. So the crisis management is an interaction process, from equilibrium to chaos and then to a new equilibrium.(2) Crisis leadership includes four dimensions:Personal Charm, Systematic Thinking, Context Interaction and Shared Vision, which is significant different from the traditional leadership. We develop the CLQ scale to measure crisis leadership, including 4 dimensions and 20 items.(3) The stakeholders’ characteristic can be changed dramatically in crisis, and result in complication for organization. On the contrary, crisis leadership is helpful to simplifying the crisis situation.(4) Stakeholders’ behavior is a significant mediated variable between crisis leadership and crisis management outcomes. Meanwhile, core stakeholders’behavior is a significant moderator variable in the path "crisis leadership- Stakeholders" behavior-crisis management outcomes".(5) The core contract has a decisive role in the complex stakeholder’s relationship structure. So when the relationship between organization and core stakeholder is handled properly, the other stakeholders will show positive behaviors, even though they are not treated specially. The main reason is that they see the possibility of long-term cooperation.(6) Core stakeholder selection has a direct bearing on crisis management outcomes. If organization selects wrong in the first time, there will be no chance to reverse.(7) In this paper, we present a 3R-stage model for crisis management, including 3 stages and 6 key points. Stage Ⅰ is reduction (key points:contract violation and relation recognition), stage Ⅱ is recognition (key points:relation selection and contract brewing), and stage Ⅲ named reconstruction (key point:contract presentation and implementation).(8) Finally, we will show how this original framework could be put into practice, including suggestions on how to identify core stakeholder and how to manage crisis step by step from a dynamic perspective. Organizations should prevent crisis from the management system; understand crisis from the relationship structure of stakeholders; respond aim at core stakeholder; management crisis from the contract reconstruction. And most of all, cultivation of crisis leadership is the most critical.