Fritidsresor Under Pressure (A): The First 10 Hours - Case Solution

I. Introduction – Fritidsresor Under Pressure

The case study of Fritidsresor will illustrate the leadership role in an organization under crisis.

As defined in dictionaries, a crisis is a time when an individual, a group, or a community is at risk or in an unsettled situation. The Chinese have an interesting way to define crisis. In Chinese, “Wéijī” means a crisis. “Wei” means “danger,” and “Ji” means “opportunity.

The combination signifies that beneath any danger, there are always hidden opportunities. Thus, beneath any unfavored circumstances, there are still underlying opportunities that leaders can exploit.

II. A CEO facing a crisis

1. Analysis of the case – Crisis management:

Crisis Management Cycle : Developed by Pursiainen (2017), the crisis management cycle is a tool to assist organizations in evaluating and improving their current risk management practices.

The framework gives organizations a clear and elaborate picture of different steps to take in times of crisis; thus, they can finally establish new, innovative activities to adapt to the holistic outline.

In this particular case, we are going to explore the crisis management cycle to evaluate Fritidsresor’s effectiveness in handling the situation and the CEO’s role in each step.

For the case (part A), only the first few stages, identification, preparation, prevention, and response, are analyzed because, till the end of part A, we have not seen the result of Fritidsresor’s maneuver.

a. First stage: identification

Organizations need to classify which type of crisis is happening so that they can develop an appropriate response to the problem.

According to Lerbinger (1997), there are seven distinct types of crises: rumors crisis, workplace violence crisis, organizational misdeed crisis, technological crisis, confrontational crisis, malevolence crisis, and natural crisis. With enough information and a full picture of the situation, the identification process is quite straightforward.

This step seems to be easy, as the case readers can recognize that this is a natural disaster affecting the business. However, it was not so clear for the Fritidsresor organization in the first few hours.

The first call to Edwards, the emergency manager, at 4.10 a.m., noted that there might be a bomb explosion (this can be recognized as a malevolence crisis), with reported floating cars in the pool. There was little information, and nobody knew what it was precisely at the time.

A typical emergency would result in more alarming calls with more detailed information. In this classification stage, Edwards was very alert and prompt to investigate more, thus clarifying what the crisis was and avoiding mislabeling the situation.

Not only Edwards, the emergency manager, was up and alert after that 4 a.m. call, but also Knutson, Fritidsresor’s communication director who was on vacation with her family far away from Stockholm, was ready and prompt to reach back to the company’s office.

Peter Ulwahn, another emergency manager, was also present very early at the office. The fact that key managers at Fritidsresor were ready and alerted at an odd hour (around 4-5 a.m.) in the most special holiday of the year (Christmas) indicates the organization’s stable, unified readiness for unstable situations.

According to Smallman and Weir (1999), organizational culture plays…