A Conceptual Model of Mindful Organizing for Effective Safety and Crisis Management. The Role of Organizational Culture

The Covid-19 pandemic has involved nations world-wide in the necessity to manage and control the spread of infection, and challenged organizations to effectively counteract an unchartered medical crisis while preserving the safety of workers. While the pandemic and geopolitical turmoil caused by the war in Ukraine are recent examples of complex environments that require effective safety and crisis management, organizations may generally need to find ways to deal with the unexpected and reliably perform in the face of fluctuations. Mindful organizing (MO) is defined as the collective capability to detect discriminatory details about emerging issues and act swiftly in response to these details, thus allowing members to anticipate, and recover from, any errors or unexpected events that arise. Organizational culture refers to the mindset shared among members which orients their actions and thus qualifies as a relevant contextual factor that determines whether the specific forms of perceiving and acting entailed by MO may emerge in an organization. The present paper aimed to propose a conceptual model linking organizational culture, MO and organizational outcomes (i.e., safety, reliability, crisis management), and delineate arguments to address the match/mismatch between MO and culture types. Specifically, it is proposed that organizational culture determines the way an organization develops MO and the subsequent ability to handle unexpected events which might jeopardize organizational effectiveness and safety. Our contribution bridges the still disparate fields of MO and organizational culture, and provides scholars and practitioners with a complexity- and uncertainty-sensitive integrative framework in order to intervene on organizational outcomes.