Strategic decision-making in the context of crisis and uncertainty

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.