Twenty-third International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has presented a severe test of leadership. Severe because the pandemic combined low probability with high impact: few businesses were well prepared and the impact was highly negative for many. There was also uncertainty around the measures needed to control the outbreak as well as how markets would be affected. All this was combined, for many organisations, with a perceived need to act fast. In these conditions two immediately critical leadership decisions relate to control and communication. Who should have decision power? Who talks and who listens? In a traditional hierarchy one answer is to focus both control and communication more tightly at the top. This can work, but senior managers risk becoming dangerously out of touch with what is happening on the ground and the organisation can become slow and inflexible. In this article we analyse how hierarchies can thrive rather than just survive in complex conditions. We begin with insights from the American Navy during World War I and related advances in neurobiology in the 1940s. Drawing on interviews with the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO), this framework is then applied to the multinational brewer, Carlsberg, and its successful response to the current crisis. Rather than adding to the polarised debate about the virtues of different organisational structures, whether hierarchical or decentralised, we conclude by suggesting that a hierarchy, if well led and managed, is extremely flexible and can, in Whitman’s phrase, ‘contain multitudes’.