Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, ETH, Switzerland
Managing through crises is an essential organizational capability, and an effective strategy is inter-firm collaboration. While this is well established for crises affecting individual organizations or supply chains, what happens when the crisis is so extensive that it affects all organizations? In a constrained crisis environment, it is clear which organization needs help and which organizations provide help. In a large-scale crisis, however, all organizations can be incapacitated. In this extreme context, the usual conditions that enable collaboration, such as trust, experience, and buffer resources, may be absent or hard to find. The healthcare equipment crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic provides a case in point. During such a large-scale crisis, the conditions necessitating collaboration also limit its effectiveness, leading to what we term the crisis collaboration paradox. In this research, we draw on inter-organizational collaborations and crisis management literature to study how organizations navigated through this paradox when targeting the shortage of personal protective equipment during the pandemic. We observed two fundamentally different ways in which coalitions were initiated: Grassroots versus interfirm consortia. For 5 grassroots and 7 interfirm consortia, we collected 99 semi-structured interviews in addition to rich secondary data. Across the two initiative forms, our analysis identified three critical tactics that we term (1) “action before alignment,” (2) “constructive jostling,” and (3) “role disintegration.” Collectively, these tactics enable effective inter-organizational collaboration despite the absence of central authority or traditional collaboration scaffoldings. Overall, our analysis explains effective collaboration in the context of large-scale crises and contributes to research and theory of inter-organizational collaboration and crisis management.
