Sense and Action: Organizational Reactions in Extreme Crisis: A Survey With Brazilian Executives

ABSTRACT The objective of the paper is to analyse the actors' perception regarding how organizational actors lead the reaction of their companies to crises, changing or not their routines accordingly. The paper contributes to enlarging the understanding of crisis management by an original perspective of phenomenon evaluation based on the junction of two literature fields: sensemaking and routines, considering the organizational context that impacts crisis management. A survey of 128 company executives from different industries in Brazil was developed to identify how their companies dealt with the COVID‐19 crisis, considering sensemaking, routines and the organizational context. The results unveiled a significant and positive influence of sensemaking and organizational context on the crisis reaction, but not on the deliberated mobilization of the routines, emphasizing improvisation and trial‐and‐error. The results reinforce fast sensemaking attitudes yielding direct implementation to test the new routines, correcting course of action promptly.