Competence by leaderships in crisis situations

Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: keine, , language: English, abstract: Nowadays, company crises are the everyday life. The developments show that not only small but also medium-sized companies and even corporate groups are effected: breaches of company rules at Siemens and Volkswagen, SARS at Lufthansa or products recall at Haribo. These situations are not only big challenges for the management but also for the creditors and employees. Therefore the highest priority is to restore the competitiveness of the company.

Usually, company crisis does not appear suddenly but there are already important warning signals in the forefront of the crises. If these warning signals are ignored and different determinants like the following of a conservative, centralistic and autocratic leadership, intransparency of production costs or a missing controlling system are cumulated, there is a danger for a crisis. An essential cause for company crisis is a bad qualification of the management in combination with missing problem solving competence within the deciding process of the management level. Therefore, the management needs to be qualified by leadership skills in order to react in the right way on warning signals for crises.

This working paper shows what competences managers in companies affected by crises need. First it is important to present the basics of a company crisis. The working paper describes the types, causes and consequences of company crises, and the typical process of crises. Later, different competence approaches are presented being important for each modern manager as a company crisis can affect each company any time.