Supervisors: Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen & Winni Johansen
Discussants: Irene Pollach & Jakob Lauring

Abstract
In a complex crisis situation, existing crisis management and crisis communication literature reflects the persistence of a dilemma, namely to what extent should organizations and its top management manage and communicate centrally, and how much should they leave up to middle management and employees. Regardless of few scholars highlighting the need for decentralization, involving a higher number of (middle) managers (Weick, 1995; t’Hart et al. 1993), centralization of crises related managerial tasks and communication, often through a crisis management team, seems to be both the main theoretical suggestion but also empirical finding within current crisis management literature. However, like centralization comes with challenges, a decentralized approach to crisis management and communication might cause challenges too.

Roux-Dufort (2007) argues that “Crisis management often does very little to help theorize the functioning of organizations” (p. 106) which might help explain the lack of research discussing the actual processes of centralization and not least decentralization internally during crisis situations. The ambition of my Ph.D. is to ‘open up the organizational black box’ by theorizing and empirically investigating the functioning of the organization in the context of a decentralized approach. The Ph.D. is based upon a mainly qualitative single case study of a private, Danish company which to a large extent has decentralized its approach to internal crisis management and communication to 140 middle managers (and +1400 employees) during the Covid crisis. The case study indicates that this approach has been fostering frustration among lower levels of staff among others due to inconsistent crisis management. 3-4 individual papers will be carried out focusing on the interaction between the crisis management team (consisting of top management), middle management and employees during decentralization and potential implications.

Everyone is welcome!