Emergency management and Business Continuity must address not only the policy, mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery, Business Impact Analysis (BIA) but also the business practices. Therefore, organizational politics and culture must also be taken into consideration and can be contributed to failure of EM programs. Recently, researchers and practitioners have shown an increased interest in the politics of organizations as one of the main obstacles facing effective and efficient implementation of Emergency Management (EM) & BCM programs.
So what is organizational politics and why it is a barrier to EM & BCM?
Many researchers and practitioners in the field of HR, management and organizational behaviour have found an association between power and politics. Thus, Org politics comes in variety of shapes including ‘behind-the-scenes’ tactics, and information to influence and increase power to achieve targeted objective. Previous studies also shown that power issues regularly surface when there is scarce in resources either programmed or sudden. Individuals, managers or groups would decide to disagree with the allocation of the resources and decide to gain them for themselves or for the interest of their groups which give rise to org politics.
Typically, politically driven employees or groups would engage in negotiating, alliance building and resolving conflicting interests. Many surveys reported that more than 90 percent of managers admit that politics exist in their organizations, and surprisingly 70 percent felt that in order to be successful, you have to engage in politics. However, many authors agree that ‘political’ behaviour typically stimulate image of back-room dealing, manipulation and personal agenda not sanctioned by the organization. These behaviors would undermine fairness and create jealousy among those employees who follow policies and procedures. Research have found that when employees feel that their organization is driven by politics, they will be less productive, less interested, less satisfied with their jobs and morally depressed.
Political behaviors combined with some social and cultural norms would directly and indirectly impact the development and implementation of EM & BCM life cycle in
different degrees. Affected EM & BCM processes could include:
- Gaining authoritative role to control EM & BCM resources using many ‘political tactics’, tactics would include classifying BCM under security or crisis management etc
- Questioning EM programs and BCM values and outcome in general
- Power struggle to own critical activities, services and processes
- Forming alliances with likely minded individuals/managers to diminish other department’s EM & BCM activities
- Lobbying to demoralize EM & BCM professionals’ decisions by undermining their competency and creditability
- Lobbying for information hoarding and discourage cooperation culture
Therefore, in order to minimize overly political behaviour prior to EM & BCM implementation, company and organization leaders can do the following:
- Demonstrate that political maneuvers will not be tolerated or rewarded
- Promote collaborative EM & BCM culture among staff
- Develop and implement anti political behaviour awareness and training programs to managers and staff
- Provide equal access to EM & BCM information
- Provide continuous and transparent feedback to employees on the progress of EM & BCM
- Celebrate and award collaborative