The Role of Leadership in Solving Crises - Term Paper Example

The discussion begins with the theories of crisis, crisis management, and leadership in an organization, before proceeding to discuss the DP World case study for the application of the theories presented beforehand.Nearly all of us have a personal experience with an event or series of events that we have personally labeled “crisis,” and aside from it being unpleasant and sudden, there may be a wide range of attributes that we may attach to the experience.To discuss crisis management in an organization, the following definitions may be considered.

Crisis may refer to any event that threatens or challenges an organization’s legitimacy or image (Coombs and Holladay, 1996), implying that an unfavorable event must threaten at least the reputation, at worst the profitability and survival, of an organization (Lerbinger, 1997). Not just any unforeseen, unfavorable event can be classified as a crisis; it must be “characterized by low profitability / high consequence events that threaten the most fundamental goals of an organization” (Weick 1988:305).

More profoundly, it is “a disruption that physically affects a system as a whole and threatens its basic assumptions, its subjective sense of self, [and] its existential core.” (Mitroff, 1992:15 in Gainey, 2009:267). Also, crises are “extreme events that cause significant disruption and put lives and property at risk” (U.S. National Research Council, 1996:10).The definition of a crisis, while enlightening, only hints at the implications that comprise the essence of a crisis.

The word crisis has become such a cliché that people take it to mean whatever the most recent misfortune happened to me. These days, mention of the word is automatically taken to refer to the economic crisis that resulted from the financial meltdown in the subprime markets.The etymology of the word crisis comes from the Greek word krisis, in turn, derived from krinein signifying “to judge” or “to decide.”