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Detecting precursory signals is critical to increasing the resilience of megaprojects to crises. This study aims to investigate key crisis precursors to better apprehend traces of megaproject crises and proactively respond to approaching crises, thereby increasing project resilience.

Drawing on the theory of weak signals, 25 potential precursors of megaproject crises are extracted. Using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), four models were tested to identify key crisis precursors based on a questionnaire survey of 168 megaproject participants in China. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to examine the differences in participants’ perceptions of key crisis precursors.

Four key crisis precursors were identified: Imbalance of Benefits and Costs, Irresponsible and Unqualified Key Participants, Regulatory Mechanisms Lacking Transparency and Flexibility, and Information Uncertainty and Asymmetry. Compared with senior executives, team members think that key crisis precursors related to regulatory mechanisms and key participants are more likely to trigger crises, which affects responsive actions toward detected crisis precursors. The findings help identify problems at an early stage and enable timely intervention to mitigate crises.

Detection of key crisis precursors allows for proactive and targeted actions to mitigate crises. Megaproject development is affected by institutional mechanisms. The influence of institutions on the effectiveness of crisis management needs further investigation.

Limited attention has been paid to recognizing precursors of megaproject crises. This study identifies four key crisis precursors by uncovering the interrelationships among potential precursors, which enables rapid adaptation to future crises.

Even highly competitive, successful organizations face crisis, defined as “a low‐probability, high‐impact event that threatens the viability of the organization and is characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution, as well as by a belief that decisions must be made swiftly” (Pearson & Clair, 1998; p. 60.). This paper describes the challenges facing leaders and managers attempting to prepare their organizations to engage in effective crisis management. The paper contends that when behavioral readiness is absent, crisis management effectiveness is a matter of chance. The behavioral model draws salient contributions from role theory, learning theory, and multilevel theory and applies them to the body of crisis management theory developed over the past two decades by Mitroff and his associates as well as the recent work of Pearson and Carr (1998). Five propositions are developed and implications for research and practice are presented.

This paper aims to examine consumer reactions during product-harm crises by measuring the impact of perceived risk, blame and trust on consumer purchase intentions. Moreover, the role of perceived crisis severity is examined as affecting the three main endogenous variables of the conceptual framework.

The study uses the real-scenario approach for empirically testing the proposed conceptual framework. Participants were called to assess the story of a defective product (i.e. a soother that was recently recalled).

Results of the equation modeling demonstrate that perceived severity significantly influence trust and blame while it does not affect perceived risk. In addition, trust, blame and perceived risk notably affect purchase intentions.

Based on the study’s results, companies could implement appropriate strategies for reducing the negative consequences of a product-harm crisis.

The paper presents four key originality traits: Crisis management from the consumer perspective has received little attention. The relationship between trust, perceived risk and purchase intentions has not been explored in the crisis management field. Attribution of blame is a new variable added to the perceived risk-trust-purchase intention model. Perceived severity is examined as a moderator affecting the main endogenous variables of the conceptual framework.

The unprecedented dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced firms to re-envision the customer experience and find new ways to ensure positive service encounters. This context has underscored the reality that drivers of customer delight in a “traditional” context are not the same in a crisis context. While research has tended to identify hedonic need fulfillment as key to customer well-being and, ultimately, to invoking customer delight, the majority of studies were conducted in inherently positive contexts, which may limit generalizability to more challenging contexts. Through the combined lens of transformative service research (TSR) and psychological theory on hedonic and eudaimonic human needs, we evaluate the extent to which need fulfillment is the root of customer well-being and that meeting well-being needs ultimately promotes delight. We argue that in crisis contexts, the salience of needs shifts from hedonic to eudaimonic and the extent to which service experiences fulfill eudaimonic needs determines the experience and meaning of delight.

Utilizing the critical incident technique, this research surveyed 240 respondents who were asked to explain in detail a time they experienced customer delight during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed their responses according to whether these incidents reflected the salience of hedonic versus eudaimonic need fulfillment.

The results support the notion that the salience of eudaimonic needs become more pronounced during times of crisis and that service providers are more likely to elicit perceptions of delight when they leverage meeting eudaimonic needs over the hedonic needs that are typically emphasized in traditional service encounters.

We discuss the implications of these findings for integrating the TSR and customer delight literatures to better understand how service experiences that meet salient needs produce customer well-being and delight. Ultimately, we find customer delight can benefit well-being across individual, collective and societal levels.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of effectiveness in the context of organisational crisis. It considers the “darker” side of organisational effectiveness by exploring the processes by which effectiveness can be eroded as an organisation moves from an ordered state, through a complex one, and into a state of chaos, or crisis. It brings together complementary literatures on risk, crisis management, and complexity, and uses those lenses to frame some of the key processes that allow organisations to transition to a state that shapes their inabilities to remain effective.

The paper sets out a theoretical framework for the analysis of a crisis event and does so in a way that emphasises the role of the human element in the various stages of a crisis: the incubation phase, the operational crisis, and the post-event legitimation phase. The paper uses the emerging crisis around the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to illustrate some of the task demands associated with a crisis and the manner in which crisis events challenge the efficiencies and capabilities of organisations to deal with complex, multi-layered issues in which uncertainty is high. Given the emergent nature of that particular crisis, the use of the case is purely illustrative rather than analytically grounded in a normal case study approach.

The paper highlights a number of underlying elements that contribute to the generation of crises and offers recommendations for managers on how to deal with those demands. The paper shows how an organisation can move from an ordered state into a complex or chaotic one and highlights some of the problems that arise when an organisation does not have the capabilities to respond to the task demands generated by such a shift in the environment.

The paper challenges some of the normal practices of management in a “steady state” environment and highlights the need to consider the organisational capabilities that are necessary to deal with the transition from a stable to an unstable system state and ensure organisational effectiveness in the process. A core message within the paper is that the “normal” processes of management can contribute to the generation of crises as organisations prioritise short-term efficiencies over the strategies for longer-term effectiveness. The implications for crisis management practices are discussed.

The paper considers an issue that has wider applicability within society namely the relationships between organisational effectiveness and risk. The issues raised in the paper have applicability in a range of other societal settings.

The key output from the paper is the development of a theoretical framework that allows for an analysis of the relationships between crises and organisational effectiveness. The paper argues that effectiveness and crisis management are intrinsically linked and that crises occur when organisational effectiveness is impaired. The paper highlights the role that template-based approaches to dealing with complex problems can have in terms of the generation of crisis events.

The purpose of the present study is twofold. First, the study will investigate the importance of tradition for businesses operating during the COVID-19 crisis, notably, as a valuable proposition and strategy. Second, the study seeks to advance theoretical understanding, proposing two frameworks based upon emerging dimensions, the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities.

An online survey gathered the views of 107 predominantly micro and small-scale owner-manager and family-owned firms involved in the food and wine sector. These participants are based in Italy, one of the hardest-hit countries in the crisis.

Three fundamental dimensions emerge from the findings. The first, “embedded advantage”, concerns firms' more direct involvement and tradition-related actions. The second, “active advantage”, highlights the already established value of tradition, for example, through firm identity gained, well-established roots and firm culture. The third dimension, “strategic fusion”, underscores the importance of upgrading the business model, where innovation complements tradition strategically.

The study's revealed dimensions provide new conceptual perspectives to understand tradition in the context of firms confronting an unprecedented event. The first proposed theoretical framework illustrates that firms appear to mainly rely on tradition as the fundamental pillar of their overall strategy. Additionally, other firms engage in actions to consolidate tradition's strategic significance, while others embrace innovation to further strengthen their competitiveness. The second framework emphasises relations between these dimensions and key attributes associated with the two adopted theoretical foundations, where the need to “reconfigure tradition” clearly emerges.

This chapter evaluates the impacts of and response measures to COVID-19 pandemic on the practice of tourism in the wildlife conservancy model in Kenya thus proposing response interventions to possible tourism crises in the future.

The study uses the qualitative exploratory experience design and collects data from purposely selected conservancies' leaders and other documented materials from two main wildlife conservancies association in Kenya.

The chapter presents findings on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on wildlife conservancy-based tourism, how conservancies responded to the pandemic and conservancy leadership perspectives on how to model future tourism and related activities in the conservancies based on the lessons they have learnt from the COVID-19 experience.

With the wildlife conservancy-based tourism model in Kenya being a relatively new phenomenon, the study provides important lessons for comparison with other such initiatives in other places in the event of tourism crises in the future.

This chapter argues that better preparedness to crises and uncertainties by various tourism types and models can help mitigate against adverse effects of similar uncertainties in the future. Consequently, the findings offer a glimpse of proposals and solutions to the wildlife conservancy-based tourism models that continue to be established in Kenya and in the region.