A qualitative study on the perception of the relationship between institutionalization and crisis management of senior executives: The case of automative sector

Institutionalization which arose as a management theory in the 1970s is a management concept required for the continuation of the organization and to help organizations compete with their rivals in both the national and global arena. Although institutionalization varies based on the size of the organization, its structure (mechanical, organic), its sector and the corporate culture, it begins with the foundation of the organization to legitimate the organization before all the stakeholders. Organizations may face some internal and external crises during their operations. Even though it is difficult to predict different types of crisis and get prepared for all of them in business life, determining the risks in the sector in which the organization is in, applying alternative strategies to mitigate and tackle these risks and recording the lessons learnt in corporate memory may help to avoid the plausible risks with lesser impact. When a corporate organization structure and crisis management elements have mutual interaction rather than being independent from one another; this interaction will have a positive impact on organizational performance on the qualitative and quantitative basis alike. This study, conducted by using the phenomenology pattern, as one of the qualitative research patterns, examines how the senior executives working in the automotive sector, which is among the one with the greatest share in global trade in terms of production and employment, evaluate institutionalization, how prepared and planned they are to manage the crisis, whether they have turned the crisis into an opportunity with different strategies, the lessons learnt from the crisis, how they perceive the relationship between institutionalization and crisis management. The research data is studied by descriptive and content analysis method. According to the research results, it has been observed that the perception level of senior executives in the main themes of research model, such as "institutionalization", "crisis" and "relationship between institutionalization and crisis management" and all the sub-themes and code variations other than "corporate culture", "crisis planning" and "corporate memory" are in compliance with the theoretical framework.