Abstract:

The novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has affected individuals, societies and the global economy at both micro and macro levels (Finsterwalder and Kuppelwieser, 2020), and its psychological, socio-economic and financial effects on individuals, communities and businesses are unprecedented. Consumers were forced to change behaviour, companies to transform business models, and governments to adjust regulations. The service sector, in particular, has endured a radical Service Mega-Disruption (Kabadayi et al., 2020), and is among the hardest sectors hit by lockdown measures. Tourism, education, transportation, entertainment, healthcare retailers, bars/restaurants, hotels and airlines were forced to close, stop or limit their services, impacting their businesses, customers and employees. Crisis situations like Covid-19 provide to organizational stakeholders the opportunity to evaluate their organizational culture, management capabilities, resources and strategies. Appelbaum et al. (2012) argue that an organization’s survival depends on its ability to undergo change, be it internal or in response to an external stimulus, such as in the case of Covid-19 pandemic. Crises are an extreme form of change and mark a pivotal moment in an organization’s life, followed by a successful adaptation or death. Thus, the purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I seek to investigate crisis management strategies adopted by service organizations to face the Covid-19 crisis, while exploring the challenges and enablers of successful crisis management, and second, to explore the lessons learnt. Theoretically and empirically, the paper contributes to extant literature (e.g., Finsterwalder and Kuppelweiser, 2020) by combining the Transformative Service Research (TSR) lens on service ecosystem well-being and resilience with the dynamic capabilities perspective to explore how service organizations managed the Covid-19 crisis and what lessons can be learnt to face a future one.