Abstract:
In times of crisis, leaders are faced with deep uncertainty and effective crisis
management requires strategic decisions to ensure long-term sustainability. There
are opposing academic views on the types of cognition and philosophies used in
crisis decision-making, thus raising a need for empirical evidence. Coupled with this,
increasing turbulence in the business environment has created a renewed interest in
research on management decision-making in uncertainty. The novel coronavirus
pandemic represents an unprecedented challenge which has accelerated these
research agendas. This study explores how business leaders in the banking sector
respond to crisis and uncertainty in their organisational strategic decision-making
process.
Using a qualitative approach, twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted
with business leaders. This study found that crisis and uncertainty created opposing
forces for decision makers which led to a combination of intuition and analysis being
applied, shifts in strategy were identified and a three-stage approach was applied in
decision-making using a pragmatic philosophy.
This study contributes to literature by providing an in-depth understanding of the
strategic decision-making process used by business leaders in banking during the
coronavirus crisis, revisiting the roles of intuition and analysis in decision-making and
proposing a framework which could lead to effective and sustainable strategicdecision
making.
