How the COVID-19 Pandemic Changed the Work of Managers: Case Study of Economic Managers

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the business environment in many sectors. This study analyzes how the pandemic and the resulting global economic crisis have influenced changes in management. The aim was to explore changes in the dominance of management functions through the lens of economic managers in various companies. A case study approach was adopted to achieve the research objective. The sample file consisted of 238 managers from various operational fields in the Slovak Republic. A new methodology was created to measure the overall changes. An indicator of the rate of change in the dominance of the management functions was calculated. The index consists of two factors: changes in the time devoted to each management function during the pandemic, and changes in the importance of basic activities performed within the individual management function. This study provides an overview of all industries and describes the changes in the context of a company’s revenue development during the pandemic. It was discovered that the centralization of strategic decision making was significantly underestimated. Up to 78.69% of managers working in companies whose revenues decreased during the pandemic increased the time devoted to planning, and 90.98% of them decreased the time devoted to leading people.

Changes To the Management Control Function Due to The Impact of The Covid-19 Pandemic

“…Compared to previous studies, we cannot confirm that the time devoted to the controlling function (case studies or the whole sample) decreased in our sample, as was the case in the study by Veselovská & Hudáková (2023). The difference may be due to the different sample, as the authors focused on economic managers, and we focused on any managers with subordinate employees.…”

“…Paradoxically, the closest to our topic is an article by another Slovak authors - Veselovská and Hudáková (2023), which attempted to analyse how the Covid-19 pandemic influenced changes in management, namely on economic managers. They mainly concentrated on the time spent by the different management functions.…”

“…Controlling of activities in the company showed relatively no change. (Veselovská & Hudáková, 2023). Passetti et al (2021), among others, investigated in the first lockdown period which control mechanisms were usedwhether mechanistic or organic.…”

“…Despite its relatively short history of scientific investigation, general management has offered a huge assortment of potential options for dealing with the economic crisis caused by the outbreak of the pandemic (Veselovská & Hudáková, 2023). One of the most visible changes was the transition to work-from-home.…”

The use of modern technologies to form professional culture among future management specialists

“…Modern scientific research on the state of professional training of the future managers testify that there are a number of contradictions associated with formation of professional culture of future specialists (Veselovská & Hudáková, 2023), in particular between employers' requirements for the level of managers' professional culture and its insufficient level; between necessity training of managers with a high level of professional formation of culture and insufficient research of its theoretical and methodological approaches to the development in professional training; between higher education requirements and poor systematicity in the professional orientation of educational training programs for future managers; between the content of future professional activity and content of professionally oriented disciplines.…”