Managing the Expected: Studies on Health and Organizational Science amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Modern organizations, especially health care delivery organizations, invest a significant amount of time and resources to prepare for, respond to, and resile through crises of various kinds. And yet, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and deepened weaknesses in health care delivery organizations and public health more broadly. In this dissertation, across a quantitative and two qualitative studies, I investigate some of these weaknesses and theorize management strategies to promote health, well-being, and resilience. In Paper One (co-authored with Michaela J. Kerrissey, Nicholas Stark, James Hardy, and Christopher Peabody), using interviews conducted near the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I trace variation in communication processes in two emergency departments to construct centralization and democratization of information by contextual experts as a guiding framework for organizational communication amid crises. In Paper Two (co-authored with Mariam K. Atkinson, Masha Kuznetsova, Elizabeth Bambury, and Paul Biddinger), I use in-depth qualitative data collected across 12 urban and rural US hospitals to investigate how organizations balance the use of formal and informal practices to respond to challenges arising during crises. In Paper Three (co-authored with Amy C. Edmondson), I use data from the National Health Interview Survey to produce national representative estimates of physically distanced work across occupations and analyze the implications of physical distancing on worker health and well-being. Together, these three studies improve our understanding of managing in health care and for health, especially amid increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.