Abstract
Crises test the resilience of public service organizations. Healthcare providers must respond and innovate within tight constraints to address challenges. Presenting COVID-19 as a knowable unknown (black swan event), we adopt information processing theory to investigate how healthcare providers and their suppliers address information asymmetry to support decision-making. Building on primary and secondary datasets, we demonstrate managers were innovating internal structural responses. For black swan events, in-house ‘intelligent clients’ are intrinsic not only in managing information uncertainty associated with early stages of the crisis, but also in addressing information equivocality and joint decision-making with other organizations associated with implementing solutions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 175-198 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Public Management Review |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 6 Aug 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2023 |
Bibliographical note
This journal is now an ABS4 journal.Funding Information:
This work was supported by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under Grant EP/M017559/1 and EP/T014970/1.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- Crisis situation
- information asymmetry
- information processing
- innovation
- pandemic
- public services
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Public Administration