244 Chapter 7 this process was enabling leadership. Sanquin management took a very supportive stance and did much to align financial resources and connections to help as many collaborative groups as possible, giving them much freedom. This allowed for crisis efforts to keep moving forward positively. Simultaneously, managers, project leaders and informal leaders also acted as enabling leaders in facilitating the adaptive process within the adaptive spaces by networking, connecting, and bridging solutions to the operational system. Through these adaptive spaces, success occurred in the form of many notable research publications, workarounds for processes (as exemplified by the convalescent plasma group), and true emergence was seen in the operational system by the elimination of the paper invitations for donation and the adoption of the donor self-service program. In searching through literature assessing organizational resilience in healthcare organizations during the pandemic, five comparable studies were found.52–56 In four of these studies,52–55 similarities were found to our Chapters 5-6: great morale or a strong collective spirit that boosted productivity, many collaborative groups that were historical or new operating with trust, employee flexibility, and various issues related to communication and information flows within and throughout the different levels of the organization. Gillberg et al. also used Duchek’s framework to assess how several hospitals in Sweden coped from a nursing management perspective.52 Using qualitative methods of coding free-text responses of an online survey, their study found similarities to our Chapter 5: improvisational abilities as the employees focused on a common goal and had expedited decision-making in a traditionally-slow environment. It concluded similarly in saying that “COVID-19 resulted in paradoxes, tensions, and new experiences in organizational processes and interactions in healthcare organizations. These create an opportunity for lessons learned, not only in times of crises but also for enabling improved ways of working in accomplishing both acute care and planned care [in the day-to-day]” (Gillberg et al., p.8, brackets mine).52 However, this study found that success was based on the interconnected individual efforts as support from top management was lacking.52 Kaltenbrunner and colleagues sampled 14 large social and healthcare not-forprofit organizations (NPOs) in Austria to identify coping mechanisms at the individual and interactional level.53 Using semi-structured interviews with top and mid-level managers, they found that these NPOs faced similar challenges to Sanquin related to scarcity of personnel and ad hoc training, logistics and delivery of services, communication and coordination flows related to external clients. They developed a framework which also resonates with findings from Chapters 5-6. However, their results specify individual traits, attitudes and managerial traits that were outside the scope of our studies.53
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw