Crisis Management Process - A Literature Review and a Conceptual Integration

The 21st-century business environment requires permanent crisis management. Nowadays, managers seek to deal with a potential crisis effectively, with minimum losses or to avert the potential crisis in the best case. It can be noted that crisis managers must react proactively. Crisis management (CM) can be generally characterised as sets of approaches, measures and methods used in situations where managerial skills are no longer sufficient. The goal is obvious: minimise the impact of the crisis or avoid a potential crisis. The purpose of this paper is a literature review of crisis management approaches and, based on its summarisation, to propose a conceptual model respecting the proactive features and variables of the crisis management process. The paper highlights various definitions of CM approaches by various academic researchers and some empirical studies. A total of 98 literature sources have been reviewed for the research contribution. Particular attention is given to proactive models, which were described by many authors. All these models and approaches are analysed. The paper`s findings discuss crisis management process features and proactive aspects in a proposed Proactive Crisis Management Process (PCMP) model.