Harnessing the Power of Self-Organization in an Online Community During Organizational Crisis
Authors: Nan, Ning; Lu, Yong
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2014)
DOI: 10.25300/misq/2014/38.4.09
Organizational crisis management has traditionally favored a centralized plan-and-control approach. This study explores the possibility for an orderly crisis management process to arise unintentionally from decentralized and spontaneous actions in an online community (i.e., self-organization). Based on complex adaptive systems theory, a multilevel model is developed to account for the logical relation between individual-level actions and interactions in an online community and an organizational-level orderly and rational crisis management process, as described by the organizational crisis management literature. We apply this multilevel model to an analysis of 89,596 posts from an online community that was deeply embedded in an earthquakeinduced organizational crisis. Results indicate that fluctuation of message content themes in this online community served to energize continuous input from ordinary organization members. These input actualized new possibilities offered by the technology platform for crisis management actions (i.e., actualized IT affordances). Concatenation of immediate impacts of message content themes and actualized IT affordances formed feedback loops that moder…