The COVID-19 pandemic posed many challenges for organizational survival across the world. Innovative capability became a key force in meeting such challenges and was most evident in Egypt's banking sector. This paper explores, through semi-structured in-depth interviews with six general managers of multinational banks operating in Egypt, what innovation competences may enable organizational improvisers, or bricoleurs, to challenge, change, and achieve innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results were analyzed through the lens of Senge's five disciplines of learning organizations (Senge, 1990), with a particular consideration for the role of improvisation, and found that personal mastery is the dominant principle and is linked to achieving innovation in organizations. Within this element, the analysis also suggests that improvisation emerges from creativity, past experience, intuition, and distinct triggers, and that innovation competences appear as complementary elements of an organization's behavior, encapsulated as a form of bricolage when challenges arise and resource constraints prevail. The results suggest that a set of practices and strategies could be applied by general managers to meet the challenges they face involving constraints, such as a shortage of human resource, and that improvisation can form one of their key innovation competences.
Contribution/Originality:This study contributes to the existing literature by advancing the conversation on this topic through introducing the concept of the bricoleur as a vehicle to enhance innovative capability and introduce new and novel thinking to the challenges that banks face, as well as to the underpinning theory around Senge's learning organizations.
INTRODUCTIONA market environment that is open, challenging, malleable, ambiguous and, in general, complex, can result in continuous pressures of time which challenge traditional settings and calls for improvisation (Eisenhardt, 1997;Levallet & Chan, 2013). Organizations that respond quickly can benefit from opportunities to achieve competitive advantage (Tanriverdi, Rai, & Venkatraman, 2010), which, as Cunha & Clegg (2019) would claim, "render[s] the capacity to learn especially valuable -hence the importance of the notion of the learning organization" (p. 238). In such unpredictable environments, pre-prepared plans often do not comply with the traditional perspective of 'doing' and improvisation is the alternative. Our paper explores this concept in the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.