Success Factors of Future-Viable Organizations in the Post-COVID-19 Era

Introduction

The COVID-19 crisis has disrupted global economies and societies. Besides the pandemic crisis, many other social dynamics can be expected: significant changes are very likely due to the expected climate crisis, further digital change, global migration dynamics, and higher instabilities in the political systems of many countries. Therefore, the post-COVID-19 era will be characterized by increased social and economic dynamics. To successfully get through the next decades, organizations need to effectively cope with the upcoming challenges and seize resulting opportunities. Organizational leaders should prepare their organizations for this endeavor and steer them through these challenges. Unfortunately, the detailed dynamics of those changes are unpredictable. Therefore, it is essential for organizations and their leaders to continually learn within and from the crises, to successfully manage their present and future.

To learn from the COVID-19 crisis quickly and anticipate success factors for future crises, the authors have interviewed 24 social and organizational leaders and consulted well-grounded leadership theory. Based on the overarching question regarding success factors of future-viable organizations, the leaders were asked to externalize their learnings from the COVID-19 crisis and predict success factors for future-viability and crisis survival. The results of these interviews were categorized based on existing leadership theory: the integrative model of leadership behavior (IMoLB; Behrendt, Matz & Göritz, 2017). This model integrates the results of decades of leadership behavior research (e.g., Burke et al., 2006; DeRue, Nahrgang, Wellman & Humphrey, 2011; Yukl, 2012) in a parsimonious model and is based on well-established fundamental psychological theory: the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991), the Rubicon model (Achtziger & Gollwitzer, 2008), the Ringelmann effect (Ingham, Levinger, Graves & Peckham, 1974), the model of social loafing (Karau & Williams, 1993), the job demands-resources model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007), the group identity perspective (Ellemers, De Gilder & Haslam, 2004), and several others (Behrendt et al., 2017).

From the expert interviews and the theoretically derived leadership behaviors, success factors can be delineated that contribute to the future-viability of organizations in times of crisis. As a result, this chapter demarcates essential success factors for future-viable organizations and exemplifies those success factors based on expert experiences within the COVID-19 crisis. The resulting model of success factors of a future-viable organization in the post-COVID-19 era is provided to the scientific and practice community for further development. The model could be challenged in further theoretic refinements, used for the development of theory-based measurements, and tested in corresponding future research.