Coordination in a not-for-profit organisation during the COVID-19 pandemic: organisational sensemaking during planning meetings

PurposeThe authors examine how a not-for-profit organisation (NPO) coordinates NPO's actions during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic to remain focussed on strategic and operational goals.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a live case study of an NPO as the crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. Drawing on a sensemaking perspective that incorporates sensegiving, the authors develop a framework of five types of organisational sensemaking. The authors analyse weekly planning meetings during which managers discussed past performance, forecast performance and the forecast duration of current cash reserves.FindingsThe authors show how three of the five types of organisational sensemaking helped to coordinate actions. The authors highlight how accounting information triggers organisational sensemaking processes;but depending on the type of organisational sensemaking, accounting information has little further role. The authors also show that the stability of decisions depends on the types of organisational sensemaking.Practical implicationsThe authors show how coordination as a management control practice is enabled by organisational sensemaking within an NPO during a crisis. Organisational sensemaking enabled the agreement of actions, which enabled coordination. Accounting practices provided trigger mechanisms to facilitate organisational sensemaking.Originality/valueSince this study is the first to examine sensemaking processes and accounting practices in coordination in an NPO in a pandemic, the authors contribute to the limited research on NPOs during crises and on the management control practice of coordination. The authors extend the accounting literature on sensemaking by showing that, whilst accounting triggers organisational sensemaking, accounting is only implicated in one type of organisational sensemaking and by revealing the different outcomes of the different types of organisational sensemaking.

Perceived overqualification, felt organizational obligation, and extra‐role behavior during the COVID‐19 crisis: The moderating role of self‐sacrificial leadership: International Review of Applied Psychology

Past research has found that employees who view themselves as overqualified for their jobs tend to hold negative job attitudes and be unwilling to go beyond the call of duty. In challenging situations such as during the COVID‐19 crisis, when having “all hands‐on deck” may be important to an organization's survival, mitigating the negative tendencies of these employees becomes important. Adopting a sensemaking perspective on crisis management, we examine whether supervisors' self‐sacrificial leadership can mitigate these negative tendencies. First, we propose that employee perceived overqualification is associated with lower levels of felt obligation to the organization and thereby lower levels of extra‐role behaviors (i.e., helping and proactivity). We next propose that supervisors' self‐sacrificial leadership during the COVID‐19 crisis can evoke, especially when COVID‐19 more strongly impacts the organization, a sense of collectivism toward the organization, which mitigates the negative association of perceived overqualification with felt obligation and thus extra‐role behaviors. We tested our theorizing in samples from the UK (n = 121, pilot study) and US (n = 382, main study) in studies with a multi‐wave, time‐lagged design. Findings from both studies provide support for our theorizing. We discuss implications for research and practice concerning perceived overqualification during a crisis.