Causes of Crisis

Categorising the Causes of Crisis

Introduction

This is one approach to categorising the cause of a crisis. The five broad causes of the crisis are:

External Economic Attack
External Information Attack
Breakdowns
Psychopathology
Human Resource Factors

External Economic Attack

This refers to exogenous offensives that directly threaten the organisation’s economic and financial well-being. Examples are extortion, bribery, boycotts and hostile takeovers of the organisation.

External Information Attack

This comprises all those attacks on an organisation that emanate mainly from outside the organisation and target its proprietary and confidential information. Such attacks would include the theft of confidential information and the dissemination of damaging rumours.

Breakdowns

This is what the name implies: a breakdown in plants, essential equipment, and facilities, as well as in human operators themselves due to stress, human error, and security breaches.

Psychopathology

This consists of criminal activities such as sabotage, product tampering, executive kidnapping and sexual harassment.

Human Resource Factors

These concerns include poor employee morale, executive succession, and occupational hazards.

Goh, M. H. (2016). A Manager’s Guide to Implement Your Crisis Management Plan. Business Continuity Management Specialist Series (1st ed., p. 192). Singapore: GMH Pte Ltd.

Extracted from Appendix 1: Causes of Crisis