Navigating Disruptions: How Business Partnerships Evolve
How do companies respond when unexpected crises put their business relationships under pressure? In this session of the ZHAW International Business Seminar Series, Dr. Hossam Zeitoun explores how external disruptions affect the cooperative behaviour of executives toward suppliers, customers, and partners — and what this reveals about resilient collaboration in uncertain times.
Business leaders are often confronted with sudden, high-impact disruptions that threaten their operations. While existing studies frequently focus on how companies adjust their competitive strategies in response to such events, external crises also fundamentally reshape the way firms interact with suppliers, customers, and business partners.
Established theoretical models offer competing predictions about how leaders respond to external crises in these situations. The research of Dr. Hossam Zeitoun and his colleagues Paan Jindapon and Tigran Melkonyan theoretically predicts and experimentally tests how disruptions influence the cooperative behaviour of decision-makers. As part of the ZHAW International Business Seminar Series, Dr. Zeitoun discusses the implications for the resilience of cooperation in turbulent environments.
Dr. Hossam Zeitoun is a Reader of strategy and behavioural science, Associate Editor of the “Academy of Management Review”, and Course Director of the Executive MBA programme at the University of Warwick (Warwick Business School). His interdisciplinary research on the behavioural foundations of coordination, team production, and organizational structures has been published in journals such as the “Academy of Management Review”," Academy of Management Perspectives", “Management Science”, “Psychological Review”, “Trends in Cognitive Sciences”, and “Cognition”. Before embarking on an academic career, Hossam worked in the insurance and telecom industries and had international project experience in Gabon, Tunisia, and India. He earned his PhD at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.