How do employees experience, cope with, and organise in the face of crises and threats?

I am keen to research and understand how people experience, cope with, and
organise in the face of crises or threats. In particular how people's suffering
shapes individual or collective action? What are the impacts of their responses;
how do they interact with one another, and with institutional structures? The
aims of such research are to attenuate harm and suffering amongst
employees. First by developing knowledge that enables employees to make
sense of, cope with and organise more effectively when facing such situations.
Second, by developing knowledge that can enable organisations to better
support and equip employees in contexts of crises and threats.
I think it is important to study these phenomena is because people and
organisations will continue to face crises and threats in the future. Crises and
threats can have negative impacts on employees and there is a need to better
understand how such harm is potentiated or attenuated, and by whom. Firms
dedicate large amount of resources to ensure employees cope with, manage
and organise in response to crises and threats. Furthermore crises have
traditionally been viewed as events taking place within a limited time frame but
we see crises are becoming more sustained and less temporal (e.g. climate
crisis or refugee/displacement crises). The notion that crises are more
sustained means employees experience them for longer, and they play an
increasing role in shaping organisational realities.
Crises and threats share similarities in so far as they have the ability to cause
harm or suffering to employees, and they create challenges for organisations
and their operating environments. I am keen to explore the experiences and
different types of suffering stemming from crises and threats as well as
different organisational settings and occupations where they are experienced.
As part of my master's thesis I spent time researching inside one of Europe's
largest refugee camps in Lesbos, Greece but I am keen to explore the
aforementioned questions in more conventional milieus and not just in
'extreme contexts'.
I use the term crises and threats not only to refer to low-probability and high
impact events like natural disasters, pandemics, geopolitical conflicts, political
crises, refugee crises but to include the notion of 'creeping crises' (sometimes
also referred to as threats). As a threat they have the potential to disrupt
society but as a realisation they can weaken or destabilise institutions and
public trust.
For example the growing use of social media as a channel for information and
news in particular has created echo-chambers of conversation, and enabled
disinformation campaigns and misinformation, making it harder for news and
facts to be accepted. This threat has manifested in different events or episodes
over the last decade. Creeping crises enlarge the scope of employees and
organisations as potential sites of study in that they are crises or threats many
'conventional' organisations face.