1 / 20

Responsible Leadership in Crisis Situations Theoretical Grounding in Virtue Ethics

Responsible Leadership in Crisis Situations Theoretical Grounding in Virtue Ethics Mario Š ilar & Alejo Sison – SAMRISK Seminar – Norwegian School of Management Oslo, April 12 & 13, 2010. Contents. Introduction 1 st Part: Case Study – Hurricane Katrina

hosea
Download Presentation

Responsible Leadership in Crisis Situations Theoretical Grounding in Virtue Ethics

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Responsible Leadership in Crisis Situations Theoretical Grounding in Virtue Ethics Mario Šilar & Alejo Sison –SAMRISK Seminar– Norwegian School of Management Oslo, April 12 & 13, 2010

  2. Contents • Introduction • 1st Part: Case Study – Hurricane Katrina • 2nd Part: Theoretical Framework – Virtue Ethics • Conclusions • Questions

  3. Introduction “Within a matter of days or weeks, a crisis can redefine radically the entire reputation of a person or an organization”. • Mainstream Crisis Management Paradigm vs. Virtue Ethics Crisis Management (cope with complexity, take into account the perspective of the acting person). • Mainstream Paradigm: • Strong attention on the methods and techniques for crisis anticipation and response. • Structural and technological oriented. • Top heavy structure. • Planning based on a static/control model. • Seeking understanding through uncertainty reduction.

  4. Introduction Types of Crises not all-inclusive (Devlin, 2007): 1. Nonphysical Damage Crises 1.1 Product Issue: Credibility, Defective, Safety, Tampering. 1.2. Negative public perception of the Organization. 1.3. Market Shift 1.4. Financial Cash Problem 1.5. Industrial Relations 1.6. Adverse International Event 1.7. Workplace Violence 2. Physical Damage Disaster 2.1. Acts of Nature (e. g., Earthquake, Tornado, Flood, Hurricane) 2.2. Accidents (e. g., a fire, leak, lengthy power outage) 2.3. Intentional acts (e. g., a bomb, arson, serial killer)

  5. First Part Hurricane Katrina Louisiana and Mississippi, August 29, 2005 Aftermath: • City: 80% under water • >1000 people died or had to be rescued • Major roads: destroyed • Difficult to get in/out (people, supplies)‏ • Superdome (bad conditions)‏

  6. First Part Main Problems: • Construction of the city • Evacuation plans • Confusion – Chaos • FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) failures • Rebuilding the city • “… if the (American) government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis” (Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish, New Orleans). • “The only lifeline in Kenner was the Wal-Mart stores. We didn’t have looting on a mass scale because WM showed up with food and water so our people could survive” (Phillip Capitano, mayor of the New Orleans suburb of Keener).

  7. First Part Wal-Mart Response. Some numbers: • Provided Free Resources immediately • Reopened stores: 126 closed (within 10 days all (-15)) • Speed and effectively (before FEMA) • Sent truckloads of merchandise • Prevented chaos • Saved lives • In the 3 weeks following the storm’s landfall, Wal-Mart shipped almost 2500 truckloads of merchandise to the affected areas and had drivers and trucks in place to ship relief supplies to community members and organizations wishing to help. • Home Depot provided more than 800 hundred truckloads and used buses to transport more 1000 employees to the region from other areas. • Wal-Mart got this assistance almost immediately after the storm had passed rather than in the days or weeks that took government agencies to provide relief to residents.

  8. Wal-Mart Leadership: Emergency Strategy (Horwitz) Command Center: Expandable Structure Hurricane Tracking Software Contracts w/ private forecasters (updated info.)‏ Responses: Agile, Flexible (Protocol)‏ On-the-spot info. Calculate damage Warehouses-Send Infrastructure 5 days before trucks, satellites cell. supplies Quickly good sense of the disaster’s dimension Relief supplies, trucks Stores affected

  9. Characteristics Wal-Mart FEMA Doing job right/wrong Yes No Measure: Profit/Losses Yes No Procedure Practical Reason + Techniques Main Task: Coordinate / Planning Outcome Market signals How much “coordination”= final Outcome Authority in each agent Yes No Feedback Immediate Not Clear Future Response Learn from mistakes No: Always different Responsibility Company Blame others First Part Importance of Flexible, Contextual and Tacit knowledge for Leadership in Crisis Management

  10. First Part Four common dangers in Crisis Management: 1. Bureaucracy (misallocation of relief labor and supplies, diverting critical resources to superfluous uses or causing them to sit idle and unused, etc.). 2. Wrong Coordination (no response on time). 3.Adverse incentives. 4. Absence of competent leadership.

  11. First Part • The incentives individuals face depend strongly on the institutional context in which they operate (Sobel – Leeson, 2006). The incentives faced by individuals in the ground level are different from those faced by individuals in top level decision making. • Two types of policy mistakes (Buchanan & Tullock): • Type-one errors (errors of commission): are mistakes that result from not being cautious enough (e.g. if the FDA approves a new drug without sufficient testing and the drug make millions of people seriously ill, the FDA had committed a type-one policy error). High impact and visibility. • Type-two errors (errors of omission): are mistakes that result from being too cautious (e.g. if the FDA has an overly burdensome testing requirement for new drugs, potentially helpful drugs are prevented from reaching, or at least delayed in reaching, patients who could have greatly benefited from them). Public agencies are overly prone to commit type-two errors because are less visible. Low impact and visibility.

  12. First Part Contextual Knowledge Daily operations and actions Local Knowledge (Place and Time) Know where help is needed Supplies/human capital near Tacit Knowledge Cannot be expressed using words or numbers Know how to Improvise (Experience) Know what needs to be done (Skills) Communication is based on choices made in the marketplace e.g. How to keep our balance on a bicycle

  13. Second Part 1. Crisis management: “making the best of a bad situation”. 2. Three approaches: Rules, Results and Virtue. 3. “Rules” and “results” collapse into one because “rules” are based on probable “results”. 4. “Rules”/“results”: obtain desired outcomes regardless of means; retrospective justification. 5. But: procedural utility/intrinsic value vs. outcome utility/extrinsic value (see Simon, Sen).

  14. Second Part 6. Virtue does not exclude rules (though general and vague) nor results (though beyond control). It depends on agent’s character and decision-making (simultaneous justification); attention to means. 7. Virtuous character: Sensitivity to morally relevant features (perception). Capacity to be moved by morally relevant motives. Prudence: choose proper means to right end.

  15. Second Part • 8. Virtuous decision-making: “Habit of right action + right reasons + right feelings”.

  16. Conclusion • Successful crisis management is not guaranteed by scientific planning and prescriptive decision making (Gilpin – Murphy, 2008). • Overly rigid crisis planning procedures can raise false expectations among managers that handle crises.

  17. Conclusion • Virtue Ethics Crisis Management (VECM) emphasizes a leadership able to cope with the unexpected and uncertain, through practical reason, integrity of character and advance planning. • VECM takes into account the local and contextual knowledge.

  18. Conclusion • VECM Leadership allows individuals with local knowledge and the ability to act, make decisions and try their best.

  19. Questions ??? http://www.unav.es/filosofia/ajsison/ http://www.unav.es/filosofia/msilar/ Thank you!

  20. References • Risk Management • - Gilpin, Dawn R. – Murphy, Priscilla J., Crisis Management in a Complex World, Oxford, OUP, 2008. • Olsson, Stefan (ed.), Crisis Management in the European Union, London – NY, Springer, 2009. • Devlin, Edward S., Crisis Management Planning and Execution, NY, Auerbach, 2007. • Katrina case study • Comfort, Louise K., “Fragility in Disaster Response: Hurrican Katrina” (29 August, 2005), The Forum 3, nº 3. • - Horwitz, Steven, “Making Hurrican Response More Effective: Lessons from the Private Sector and the Coast Guard during Katrina” (2008), Policy Comment, nº 17, Mercatus Center, George Mason University. • Sobel, Russell S. – Leeson, Peter T., “Flirting with Disaster. The Inherent Porblems with FEMA”, Policy Analysis, (2006), nº 573. • Leadership and Virtue Ethics • Athanassoulis, Nafsika – Allison, Ross (2010), “A virtue ethical account of making decisions about risk”, Journal of Risk Research, 13:2, pp. 217-230. • - Sison, Alejo, The Moral Capital of Leaders. Why Virtue Matters, Northampton, Edward Elgar, 2003.

More Related