In 2020, the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) triggered a global health crisis, disrupting economies, societies, and private companies. Organizations faced urgent challenges, and most of them installed so called “task forces” to respond. Small or medium enterprises (SMEs), which play a major role in most economies, however, often encounter problems of limited resources to do so. The purpose of this chapter is to derive theoretical and practical implications on how such crises can be handled. A literature review identifies the characteristics of successful task forces and then validates them with a case study of a Swiss transport company during COVID-19, which is based on multiple interviews with the CEO between Spring 2020 and in Fall 2020. The findings include that task forces are crucial for SMEs despite their limited resources. A critical success factor is the quality of human resources, which demands careful selection. Concepts used in crisis management can also be applied in day-to-day operations to increase the organization's resilience and also general profitability.
TopIntroduction
In 2020, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) triggered the biggest global health crisis since World War II. The global pandemic outbreak of the respective coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) disrupted economies and organizations, but also changed individual lives. By the end of the first half year of 2020, more than 500,000 people have died and economic losses were expected to be tremendous (Roser et al., 2020). In addition to the threat to public health and wellbeing of millions of people, organizations suddenly faced change management and leadership challenges of unprecedented urgency. Strategic visions, and day-to-day operations had to be adapted to a new reality within a short time.
Public authorities, multinational organizations and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) often installed so called ‘task forces’ to manage the new situation. Generally speaking, a task force is a temporary organization consisting of individuals within an organization and operating in an ad hoc structure tailored to solve one specific problem (e.g. Lundin and Söderholm, 1995; Burke and Morley, 2016; Einola and Alvesson, 2019). Task forces handle situations by managing information flows and they are generally designed to cover all capacities and competencies needed to support the decision-making of the executive board in regard to this situation.
Although crisis management in general is thoroughly researched (e.g. Billings, Milburn and Lou, 1980; Weick, 1988; Benini, 1999; Boin, Kuipers and Overdijk, 2013; Bundy et al., 2017), and there are even first publications on Covid-19 (e.g. Bailey and Breslin, 2020; Fernandez and Shaw, 2020; He and Harris, 2020; Wegmann and Schärrer, 2020), there is no clear understanding of the morphologies, nor the value of these Covid-19 task forces, let alone the mechanics at play within them. From a theoretical perspective, there are several theoretical concepts that address mechanisms within a newly formed temporary team. Most of these theories have their roots in the modern neoclassical economic literature. For instance, Human Capital theory (Becker, 1962, 1964) emphasizes that people and their capacities influence the performance of the organizations. Specifically, it is specified that human capital gains importance when the talent in question is not readily available in the labor market, which corresponds precisely to Covid-19 task forces (Crook et al., 2011).
From a practical perspective, there is a lack of guidelines on how such task forces should be both composed and led, in order to be successful during Covid-19 and equally as an instrument of organizational resilience for the post-Covid-19 era. Additionally, while for larger organizations, the installation of a task force seems to be easier and more feasible, for small or medium enterprises (SMEs) problems in terms of their limited resources (Sharma, 2020) are far more prevalent. An additional difficulty is that managers are subject to a double pressure as they are already involved in the daily business, on the one hand, and have to get control of their functions in the newly formed Covid-19 task forces, which should handle the pandemic on the other hand.
In literature, there is no clear definition of SMEs (e.g. Omar and Ismail, 2009), but often the size of the enterprises (i.e., fewer than 250 employees) is the unique criterion. Worldwide, there are approximately 400 million SMEs that make up over 95% of firms and create two thirds of the jobs (Shift, 2019). Consequently, these SMEs and their task forces move into focus when it comes to handling the Covid-19 crisis and oncoming crises in organizations.
This chapter aims to examine these task forces in SMEs and to particularly explain which characteristics make them useful instruments to respond to incidents. The aim is to answer to the following research question: What characteristics of task forces in small and medium-sized organizations lead to effective management of the Covid-19 crisis?
To answer this question, this chapter starts by summarizing crisis management and change management literature and adds rare but existing research results on the Covid-19 context. From this, it identifies the most relevant theories (e.g., Human Capital and Social Capital theory) and underlying concepts needed to understand the context. Subsequently, a case study of a Swiss transport and logistics company navigating the situation of Covid-19 will shed light onto specific challenges experienced and lessons learned. The Swiss medium-sized company operates mainly in the domestic market and has more than 200 employees. As most of the organizations, the company decided in March 2020 to install a task force of five members to handle the Covid-19 situation.