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This paper primarily aims to identify the multilevel learning processes emerging from abrupt telework implementation in a public knowledge-intensive organization (KIO) amid the COVID-19 crisis.

This single-case process research was guided by interpretivist epistemology. Empirical data from documentary research and 41 interviewed managers were processed by inductive qualitative analysis using the multilevel learning theoretical model.

Eight types and three modes of learning processes during the COVID-19 pandemic were identified in a public KIO, iteratively emerging in multilevel learning dynamics during the compulsory adoption of telework and replacing the face-to-face work mode conducted since its foundation.

As insider researchers, while daily and privileged access to the field was obtained, it also demanded their continuous effort to maintain transparency and scientific distancing; conceptual results are restricted to process theorisation studies, specifically the 4Is theoretical model in the scope of crisis learning process studies concerning KIOs.

This study provides evidence for managers to adopt interactive dynamics among eight multilevel types and three learning modes of emergent learning, developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and support learning practices’ implementation and routinisation across three organizational levels in crisis situations. In addition, evidencing emergent types of learning enables organizational learning (OL) researchers to examine how organizational structures and work practices either promote or inhibit different learning types and impact multilevel learning when adopting teleworking during a crisis.

This research has theoretical value in two ways: (i) Providing empirically supported knowledge: This involves understanding multilevel learning processes resulting from emergent learning in a public KIO that abruptly adopted teleworking during a crisis context; (ii) deepening process theorization studies on OL: To achieve this, we enhance the 4I model by incorporating eight types and two modes of learning processes. These processes iteratively emerge from the individual and group levels towards the institutional level in a public KIO.

This study aims to explore the management learning during a long-term crisis like a pandemic. The paper addresses both what health-care managers have learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the management learning is characterized.

The paper is based on a qualitative case study carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic at two different public hospitals in Sweden. The study, conducted with semi-structured interviews, applies a combination of within-case analysis and cross-case comparison. The data were analyzed using thematic deductive analysis with the themes, i.e. sensemaking, decision-making and meaning-making.

The COVID-19 pandemic was characterized by uncertainty and a need for continuous learning among the managers at the case hospitals. The learning process that arose was circular in nature, wherein trust played a crucial role in facilitating the flow of information and enabling the managers to get a good sense of the situation. This, in turn, allowed the managers to make decisions meaningful for the organization, which improved the trust for the managers. This circular process was iterated with higher frequency than usual and was a prerequisite for the managers’ learning. The practical implications are that a combined management with hierarchical and distributed management that uses the normal decision routes seems to be the most successful management method in a prolonged crisis as a pandemic.

The gained knowledge can benefit hospital organizations, be used in crisis education and to develop regional contingency plans for pandemics.

This study has explored learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and found a circular process, “the management learning wheel,” which supports management learning in prolonged crises.

Complex crises affect tightly coupled systems making them highly unpredictable. This paper aims to determine how organizations learn from their crisis experience shaping their knowledge and transformation trajectory toward and beyond survival. A theoretical framework integrating organizational learning (OL) and knowledge management in organizational transformation (OT) in complex crises is presented.

This conceptual paper presents a systematic literature review on OT in crisis from 2000 to 2021. To achieve integration, the authors searched for studies on OT, knowledge management and OL, each paired with a crisis.

Crises highlight the emergent and decentered nature of knowing and organizing. This study suggests that OT is achieved through various changes in organizational knowledge. Different learning modes enable the transformation of knowledge in a crisis: contextual or situated learning, strategic and collective integration.

The authors' pandemic experience may have influenced the analysis. This paper does not account for new types of learning emerging due to the influence of digital technologies.

Organizations may hasten renewal through distributed crisis management facilitated by contextual and strategic learning and collective integration.

This study categorizes learning, based on its function in crisis management, into three types: contextual learning for creative problem-solving, strategic learning for leadership and direction and collective integration to evaluate their crisis journey. Through this classification, this study sheds light on the types of knowledge needed to manage crises effectively, showing that organizations can leverage their crises by transforming and innovating themselves in this turbulent period.

The prevalence of instability and crises in organizational ecosystems seems to be on the increase, with an upward trend in the occurrence of, for example, natural disasters, such as tornadoes in America, bushfires in Australia and the widespread outbreak of diseases, e.g., Covid-19. As contexts of crisis increase in frequency, the ability of organizations to adapt and effectively respond to crises has become a key necessity for organizational survival and continuity. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the repercussions of crises may be curtailed through a multidimensional crisis management approach.

This paper applies a narrative literature review and concept mapping to synthesize and establish relationships between the literature in the domains of leadership, knowledge management, learning and contexts of crisis. The output of this methodological orientation is the Integrated Crisis Management Framework, presenting a conceptualized overview of the symbiotic and intertwined manner through which leadership, knowledge management and learning contribute towards effective crisis management.

According to the analysis and the conceptual underpinnings of this paper, in contexts of crisis, leadership is generally responsible for aggregating crisis management strategies and establishing employee motivation. Knowledge management, on the other hand, provides the infrastructure necessary for calculated yet rapid decision-making. Similarly, in times of crisis, learning is a prerequisite for the development of a “learningful” organization, which contributes towards crisis management by serving as the organization's “memory” – where lessons learned from previous crises suffice to guide future crisis response.

The literature in crisis management reveals that existing crisis management models and frameworks generally consider crisis from a unidimensional perspective, neglecting to account for the multifaceted nature of crises, and the numerous attributes necessary to overcome contexts of crisis. To address this gap in the literature, this paper proposes a multidimensional conceptualization of crisis management through combining three core elements, including leadership, learning and knowledge management. The novelty of this paper is an Integrated Crisis Management Framework, and eight empirical propositions, which act as an impetus for future research.

This study investigates the processes that the US universities and colleges used to learn during the COVID-19 pandemic and the factors that facilitated and impeded their learning processes.

To address this study’s research questions, this study used a crisis communication and learning lens to interview crisis response team members from 30 US higher education institutions in May 2020 (the first pandemic semester). In October 2020 (the second pandemic semester), this study conducted follow-up interviews with 25 of the original interviewees. Overall, this study conducted 55 interviews.

Learning during the COVID-19 pandemic is facilitated by a recognition of a serious deficiency in the current system and impeded by the need to act quickly. The findings demonstrate the process by which decisions, actions and strategies emerged during crises.

This investigation illustrates how crises can prompt organizational learning while demonstrating the critical role of internal and external resources in the learning process.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how individuals in projects learn from crises.

The multiple‐case protocol described by Yin and his six sources of evidence were utilized. Observations were contemporaneous and somewhere between direct and participative. Bias was avoided by having the observer on site, but not part of the project team. A diary recorded events; company notes and records substantiated observations.

The study contributes to the understanding of the need that project managers have to adapt to changes from plan and the coincidental learning that occurs in the workplace. Both cumulative and abrupt crises treated by project/site teams and corporate staff are described. A necessary and sufficiency approach was used to rationalize the organizational learning. The necessary condition was that the episodes could be described in terms used by Gherardi in her treatment of routine learning. As a sufficiency condition, the authors discussed the systemic approach in which these episodes are handled.

Because research was built on case studies, one has the reservations commonly associated with this approach. Extension from and agreement with previous studies, however, lend to acceptance of the study.

Results suggest that crises can be managed in accordance with four general responses associated with learning within the organization. The responses themselves are associated with five organizational practices that aid management in general.

The value of the work is that it extends basic concepts of organizational learning to treating crises in projects, which are both by definition unique.

Contemporary armed conflicts predominantly take place in developing countries and there are often non-state actors involved in them. Civilians have been deliberately targeted in recent conflicts, and the international community has paid more attention to their protection. Human security means that individuals’ safety is a priority on the security agenda. Organizational learning is necessary in crisis management in order to evolve and provide tools to ensure human security. Organizational learning in crisis management requires individual learning, but individual learning does not necessarily lead to organizational learning at the level of institutions. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the development of crisis management and peace-building when taking into account crisis management personnel's experiences and their value in organizational learning processes. The results are applied to the context of humanitarian logistics that have special features including pace in comparison to other crisis management contexts.

The empirical material consists of a Delphi panel process representing 15 experts and interviews of 27 individuals who had served as employees in civilian crisis management and military crisis management duties in Kosovo. The interviewees from the military side had background of being either a reservist or professional officer.

Interaction and communication abilities are required from crisis management personnel and institutions. Personnel in crisis management need opportunities to give and receive feedback. At the personal level, work in crisis management is important for an individual. Returning home may be more challenging for an individual than starting to work in a mission. The framework of organizational learning is adequate for developing crisis management and humanitarian logistics.

Crisis management personnel's feelings and opinions in depth have been rarely studied and the present study provides information about this personal level. Because of using two methods focussing on organizational learning and feedback, partial methodological triangular was carried out, which increased the reliability of the results. In regard to humanitarian logistics, feedback arrangements are also important when intending to develop learning organizations. Return arrangements for personnel in humanitarian logistics are also an important focus of study.

This paper aims to identify the characteristics that a crisis unit should have to achieve effective learning after crisis. Literature has identified many relations between learning organizations and crisis; yet, there is a dearth of research on specific studies about crisis units and their post-crisis learning features. Thus, this paper aims to fill such a gap by giving some practical answers to this question: How can the crisis unit reduce defensiveness phase and extend openness and forgetfulness while learning after the crisis?

This research mobilizes a framework composed by three theoretical grids: the post-crisis learning cycle (Kovoor-Misra and Nathan, 2000); the characteristics of a learning organization (Senge, 1990); and the mechanisms of crisis learning (Mitki and Herstein, 2011). A qualitative investigation is conducted to study a crisis within an oil company (PON).

This paper shows that the duration of the learning cycle depends not only on the organization context but also on the characteristics of the crisis unit. Along with the cognitive, structural and procedural mechanisms, which contributed differently in each phase, the mixed framework allowed operationalizing Senge’s dimensions.

The elaboration of a single case study could be considered as a limitation, although it allows a deeper analysis of events within the organization.

This paper pinpoints the characteristics that organizations should have as well as the learning mechanisms they should use during each phase of the post-crisis learning cycle.

This paper analyzes crisis units as learning structures, which has not been seen yet in known literature.

The COVID-19 pandemic has entailed a critical situation for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) since restrictions on business activity have been imposed by authorities to reduce infections. The result is that SME managers must manage their firms through a crisis under very challenging conditions. The purpose of the present paper is to address how SME managers respond in the second “wave” of COVID-19 based on their perceived uncertainty as well as eventual learning from the first “wave” in early 2020.

Four hypotheses are presented, resulting in a theoretical model relating crisis impact, uncertainty, learning from crisis experience and effectuation behaviour. The theoretical model is tested through an empirical questionnaire-based quantitative study of Norwegian SMEs in the bar and restaurant sector, applying structural equation modelling as the analytical technique.

The results show that impact from COVID-19 leads to both uncertainty and learning and further that uncertainty primarily leads to a focus on affordable loss while learning leads to experimentation behaviour.

The present paper is novel in several ways. First, it empirically studies a unique situation where a crisis encompasses two “waves” of significant impact on the firms in focus. This provides the opportunity to address managers' learning through a crisis for application in a very similar situation later. Second, the present paper provides an empirically supported model of how uncertainty or learning leads to different dimensions of effectuation behaviour in a crisis situation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate followers’ judgments of leader culpability and learning during a crisis, and the extent to which judgments of culpability create hopelessness and reduce crisis learning. The authors also study factors that moderate these relationships.

Using the survey method the authors collected data from 354 individuals from a nonprofit organization that filed for bankruptcy. Respondents’ comments also provided qualitative data that was used to triangulate the findings.

The authors find that followers made judgments of leader culpability and reported crisis learning. However, followers’ judgments have no direct effect on their crisis learning, but have an indirect effect by increasing hopelessness. The authors also find that followers’ job satisfaction and perceptions of sufficient crisis communications moderate this relationship. The qualitative data provides insights into the areas on which leaders were judged, and what was learned during the crisis.

More research on internal stakeholders’ judgments of their leaders during organizational crises is important as they affect followers’ psychological states and behaviors. Future research can test the findings in a longitudinal study.

Leaders need to pay attention to the judgments of their followers during a crisis as they could foster hopelessness and reduce learning. Providing sufficient crisis communications and enabling job satisfaction could lessen these negative effects.

Extant research tends to focus on the judgments of external stakeholders during crises. This study is one of the first to examine the effects of internal stakeholders’ judgments of leader culpability on their sense of hopelessness and crisis learning, and the moderating factors that reduce their negative effects. The authors also contribute to understanding what aspects of leadership are judged by followers during a crisis, and what followers learn from a crisis. These are areas that have not been previously examined in crisis management research. The authors also provide evidence from individuals in an actual organization in crisis which tends not to be the norm in crisis attribution and crisis learning research.