Ecosystem Well-Being and Resilience: Lessons from Crisis Management in Service Organizations

ABSTRACT

Purpose

In this paper, we investigate the strategies and approaches adopted by service organizations to navigate a humanitarian crisis and the lessons learnt from the crisis to face a future one. Understanding the effect of a crisis triggered by health pandemic hazards on services delivery and management, organizational strategies for survival and recovery, and the recovery post-crisis, in terms of building organizational and ecosystem resilience, is the focus of this paper.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Using a qualitative research design which closely approximates the theory-in-use (TIU) approach (Zeithaml et al. 2020), we interview 47 elite informants from service organizations that were particularly severely impacted by the crisis. We follow Corbin and Strauss’s (2014) procedure for analysis of the interviews (i.e., open, axial and selective coding) and Saldaña (2013) for thematic analysis.

Findings

Drawing on Transformative Service Research (TSR) and dynamic capabilities perspective, we develop an empirical framework of crisis management which focuses on dynamic co-creation of service ecosystem well-being and resilience. Service organization responses included 1) retrenchment and balancing supply and demand, 2) service re-design and provision, 3) imposed service innovations, 4) digital servitization and 5) rethinking business models. Aiding with the process of crisis management in the face of uncertainty are dynamic capabilities, including strategic flexibility, market orientation, customer centricity, transformational leadership, and technological/digital capabilities.

Originality/Value/Contribution

The study provides a novel applied framework which sheds light on how organizations that co-created value with other firms, suppliers, customers, stakeholders (the focus of B2B marketing) fundamentally transformed their services to fulfill human and ecosystem actors’ needs, by placing well-being right at the center of their crisis management strategies. We combine the 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 any future crisis. We argue that well-being and resilience are dependent on a service co-creation process that involves multiple ecosystem stakeholders at the individual, organizational, community and societal levels. We have built on Anderson’s et al. (2013) and Chen et al. (2020) work to explore empirically how well-being can be co-created in time of crisis. The process of value co-creation, through the responses identified in our paper (e.g., digital servitization and imposed innovations), were adopted to provide physical, health, financial and social safety to the service ecosystem actors (primarily customers, employees, and managers) during the pandemic.

Practical implications

The findings contribute to the service marketing practice by identifying the managerial strategies that blend TSR and dynamic capabilities. The study provides an applied framework which sheds light on how organizations fundamentally transform their services to fulfill human and ecosystem actors’ needs, by placing well-being right at the center of their crisis management strategies. Well-being became a function of fulfilling the most basic human needs (belonging, safety, security and hygiene) of customers, employees, managers and communities. Our research helps managers and decision-makers to identify the right strategies and capabilities needed to manage a crisis. Critically, managers should stress building the skills of market orientation, digitalization and strategic flexibility to manage uncertainty. Service organizations require flexible and integrative decision-makers who elevate service innovation to a core strategic issue to come out from a crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Service ecosystem
• crisis management
• transormative service research
• ecosystem well-being
• value co-creation
• dynamic capabilities
• digital transformations

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and insights. They are also grateful to business research students in their universities who helped in the process of data-gathering.

Disclosure statement

The authors confirm that there are no known conflicts of interest associated with this publication and no financial support has been received for this work.

Notes

1. Five informants were from outside the UAE, discussing the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Lebanon.