Services managers’ awareness of crisis management: attitudes and preparation

All organizations, regardless of their success, will potentially face some kind of business crisis. The purpose of the current study was to explore managers’ awareness, attitudes, and implementation strategies with respect to crisis management (CM) in the service sector in Greece. The research was exploratory in nature and data was collected by carrying out semi-structured in-depth interviews with key managers in 26 companies. The open ended questions were content analyzed. Respondents identified the intangible nature of services, the service encounters, as well as the “front line employees’ performance” and the “recovery strategy responses to service failures” as the major reasons for business crisis in services organizations. Additionally, the results revealed that a limited number of companies realize the importance of crises and, rather than apply a proactive strategy, mainly depend on their managers’ experience.