Too late to act: when crises become tragic

Abstract

Purpose

This article aims to explore the tragic nature of crisis and identify managers’ decision-making processes and strategies when they are trapped by events beyond their understanding and control. In this article, the tragic is viewed as the collision of an overdetermined scenario perceived as inevitable, insurmountable and irreparable and the managers' strategies to free themselves from this scenario and divert its trajectory.

Design/methodology/approach

We make a crossed literature review between crisis management and Greek tragedy as proposed by scholars in classical literature.

Findings

We make two theoretical contributions to the literature on crisis management. First, we articulate a set of research proposals into a model to explain how managers' decisions make the crisis tragic. Second, we enrich the field of crisis management by highlighting strategies in order to avoid them.

Originality/value

We use Greek tragedy, not as a metaphor to characterize the consequences of crises as the authors usually do, but as an analytical lens to explore their inexorable, insurmountable and irremediable nature and the decisions made by managers that would make crises tragic.

Citation

Clément, M.-L. and Roux-Dufort, C. (2020), "Too late to act: when crises become tragic", Management Decision, Vol. 58 No. 10, pp. 2139-2153. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-07-2020-0880