M19 - Business Administration: OtherReturn

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.

In the conditions of the new economy, business investment in information and communications technology (ICT) has proven to be critical for company development. The main reason is that performance in other business areas is becoming gradually dependent on ICT. The theoretical part of the paper, based on a literature review, discusses the state of the art in the field related to the impact of ICT on selected non-financial performance areas. The aim of the empirical part is to analyse the relationship between the degree of ICT implementation and production quality, customer, and human capital. We employ a questionnaire among industrial companies in the Czech Republic in order to test these relationships. The analysis finds statistically significant relationships between the examined constructs. Our findings suggest that the quality of ICT has a significant impact on production quality, customer and human capital.