This article draws attention to the social context and working methods in crisis management. Based on 1000 interviews with business leaders in Swedish small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), we analyze crisis management in practice and ask: What social contexts do business leaders use in crisis management, and what working methods do they rely on? Most companies in this study do not have any form of crisis group; rather, they deal with issues reactively as they occur. Few of the companies work continuously with a crisis plan and only slightly more than half of those that have crisis plans report that it has been helpful in dealing with the COVID‐19 situation. The study concludes that Swedish SMEs seem reliant upon a process that has an emerging nature whereby decisions are largely based on gut feeling. However, the companies in our sample that experienced a significant revenue decline due to the COVID‐19 situation report that they employ a more centralized and deductive approach with reports and documents as a basis for their work. The study contributes to a developed understanding of how crisis management works in practice.

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Leadership has increasingly been advocated as a potent organizing practice, linked positively to several performance dimensions as well as successful organizational development and change. Despite these alleged promises, the specific characteristics of leadership processes as they unfold in a construction context have not been fully captured by construction researchers. This paper is predicated on an identified lack of methodological richness underlying leadership studies in construction. While a growing number of contributions have quantitatively tested the ideas and models of leadership scholars, few have qualitatively explored the experiences and interpretations of the actual people that practice leadership in their daily work in construction companies. Drawing on a rich qualitative interview study, this paper analyzes open-ended stories about leadership in the largest construction companies in Sweden. The findings show how leadership styles have been shaped to align with traditional work and organizing principles, but also how they, by the same token, pose a seemingly unresolved tension with change initiatives that seek to reorganize to improve organizational performance. Altogether these findings indicate that there are grounds to question the transformative potential of leadership in construction companies, as practiced today. The paper concludes by outlining the practical implications of these findings, together with some analytical generalizations that can serve as pointers for a strengthened leadership agenda in construction research, one that is characterized by an increased methodological richness and accentuated focus on the context-specific aspects of leadership.

PurposeThis paper investigates the ways managing directors (MDs) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involve employees in strategic conversations. The paper examines how managers interact with employees in strategic conversations, and why the managers do so (or do not), to generate empirically grounded knowledge about the nature of internal openness in SMEs.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs a general inductive approach and is based on in-depth interviews with 60 Swedish MDs with development and growth ambitions.FindingsThe paper develops a model of employee involvement in strategic conversations based on the nature and intensity of the MD–employee interaction. A key finding is that SMEs exhibit wide variation in terms of employee involvement, from virtually no employee involvement to, in some cases, far-reaching company democracy. The reasons for this variation are complex, but personal preferences and company size are shown to have an impact, as does, to some degree, ownership structure. In contrast to existing research, the limitations and drawbacks of involving employees in strategic conversations are outlined.Originality/valueThe study provides important insight into MDs' views and practices of internal openness in strategic conversations in SMEs. A model of employee involvement in strategic processes is outlined, and potential limitations of internal openness are highlighted.

Crisis management research is strongly influenced by the behaviour of large multinationals with few insights into how small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) mitigate the negative effects of exogenous shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Inspired by the capability-based view on crisis management, we postulate that management openness and degree of interactivity determine SME crisis response. We test our theoretical model with an original dataset of 902 Swedish SMEs compiled from a telephone-based survey conducted in June 2020. We find that formalised procedures for crisis management and openness to input from others, particularly external actors, enhances an organisation’s ability to make a decisive rapid response. We discuss our findings and suggest that formalised procedures and openness are important components of an SME’s rapid response capability.