Controlling and Its Influence on Organizations’ Functioning under Conditions Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic

The paper concerns the role of controlling—a contemporary management method—in organizations operating under conditions caused by COVID-19 as a black swan event, which may cause a crisis within an organization. The main aim of the paper is to verify whether quality of controlling has the ability to mitigate negative effects of organizational disruptions occurring in such conditions on the performance of the organization as a whole. Empirical research was performed in order to verify the proposed set of hypotheses. The research was carried out among 1133 organizations operating in Poland, Italy, and the USA during an active wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, influencing the way in which organizations functioned in those countries. Linear regression analysis and multigroup path analysis were performed in order to verify the hypotheses. The results show that, indeed, quality of controlling in an organization limits the negative influence of organizational disruptions on organizational performance, simultaneously positively influencing the organizational performance itself. Moreover, such effects are the strongest among organizations that were able to function without crisis in such critical conditions and non-existent among those who were not able to survive such crisis. The results show that the use of controlling can support organizations in avoiding crisis while operating in unpredictable and dynamic environments or support them in surviving that crisis, in cases where avoiding it is not possible. This confirms that these theoretical considerations can be usefully applied in the practice of management.