Keywords

Flexibility, Flexibility of Human Resources, Crisis Management

Introduction

Human resources in general expects crises occurrence in the near or in the distant future for any organization. The response or handling of these crises is based mainly on some plans to reduce and control the magnitude of the expected losses or negative consequences. It requires a difference between the expected and the aware of what human resources will do, i.e., between the expected and the actual to stop the crisis and address the damage caused by it, so the administration is doing its utmost to remove the difference that may result in the inability to address the crisis, leading to a new crisis. Human resources management must adapt quickly with the emergence of the crisis without hesitation through important steps, for example; taking with senior management to hold a general meeting of all stakeholders in the organization to explain the plan to deal with the crisis and how it will affect the Organization, its staff and their salaries. In this research, we will address the topic of "The role of human resources flexibility in crisis management - field research in the Ministry of Health and Environment", which explains the relationship of human resources flexibility in crisis management through four parts in the paper. First, we discussed the flexibility and importance of human resources, and then identify the concepts of crisis management. In the third part we will addressed the practical aspect of the researched sample (Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment), and in the fourth part we will address the conclusions and recommendations on the most important findings we have reached by studying the subject.

Research Methodology and Previous Studies

Research Problem

Since the early years of its emergence, the management has witnessed a clear and significant interest in human resources management as it deals with the organization's most important resources and being the main driver of other resources. Since crises have continued to change and develop, it is difficult to deal, predict or prepare human resources for them. For instant, those crises that emerged in 2019, the Corona crisis, which paralysed the world in various economic, social and political fields, hence the problem of studying one of the emerging crises and consideration. The question now is how to deal with it by the department of Human Resources which specialized in this field. Through a set of samples researched in the Ministry of Health and Environment, the problem of research can be identified through the following questions:

1. What is the role of human resources flexibility in managing the Corona crisis?

2. How does human resource flexibility affect crisis management?

The Importance of Research

The importance of the research stems from the importance of the variables of the topic marked by "the role of human resources flexibility in crisis management", as it deals with the theoretical interpretation of human resources concepts and crisis concepts, as well as analysis the results of the applied aspect, and the interpretation of data on the impact of human resource flexibility in crisis management, in particular, the Corona crisis. Based on the field of study by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment in Baghdad, which includes a range of health centers, we have taken opinions of staff on how to manage the Corona crisis through questioner.

Search Objectives

The research seeks to achieve a range of objectives in the light of the role of human resources flexibility in crisis management as follows:

1. Highlighting the concept of human resource flexibility, as well as adopting a range of human resources dimensions to learn about their role in crisis management.

2. Learn about the concept of crises and the factors affecting them.

3. Demonstrate the importance of crisis management and identify its dimensions.

Research Hypotheses

Main hypothesis: there is a statistically significant correlation between the independent variable (human resources) and the dependent variable (crisis management).

Second hypothesis: there is a statistically significant correlation between the dimensions of the independent variable (human resources flexibility) and the dimensions of the dependent variable (crisis management).

Research Approach

The research adopted the descriptive analytical approach in describing theoretical, scientific and applied aspects for in-depth (the role of human resources flexibility in crisis management/field research in the Ministry of Health and Environment)."

Field, Society and Sample Research

The health sector in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, has been selected as an area for the application of research, and a group of health patients dedicated to the treatment of Corona. The patients have been identified under the auspices of the Crisis Cell Authority of the Ministry of Health and Environment in order to study the subject. As a research sample, while the research community is a group of 210 staff from the medical and administrative field working in the centers of the health crisis management dedicated to isolating patients (Corona) in medical isolation hospitals.

The Theoretical Aspect

The Concept of Human Resources Flexibility

Expressed in an adaptation that indicates the organization's ability to respond to unexpected changes, Vicente defined flexibility as: "The organization's ability to identify changes in the external environment in order to mobilize resources with new aspirations and rapid responses to these changes" and flexibility as: "The organization's ability to respond to all unexpected developments. In its internal and external environment.” Human resources flexibility can be defined after recognizing the concept of flexibility, as the term "human resources flexibility" was believed to have been proposed in the mid-1980s, and is intended to provide some methods of employee management and to help improve their performance (Seid-Mehdi, 2014).

The Importance of Human Resource Flexibility

Over the years, flexibility has become more important due to the significant changes in the world as well as in the market. The enterprise environment has undergone many changes, enterprises now have to face dynamic and complex environments. As efficiency has increased and customers have become more demanding, new technologies are changing very rapidly, and it is difficult to know the new direction in the effects of globalization the consequences of the crisis. All of which force organizations to have the ability to respond to changes, adaptability, and mean that they become flexible in highly competitive environments due to significant changes (Lover, 2017).

The Dimensions of Human Resources Flexibility

Flexible human resources management focuses on enhancing staff flexibility in jobs, skills and behaviors in accordance with organizational needs, including a series of human resources management strategies. The reason behand that is to influence employee psychology, guide their behavior, and ultimately bring together personal alignment, organizations and common goals. So, this paper divides flexible human resources management into three dimensions: strategical Functional flexibility, expanded skills flexibility, flexibility of behavior. The flexible strategy functional is to strengthen multi-skilled staff capable of multi-tasking in different and adaptable conditions to work between different departments quickly and at low cost (Chen, 2016), dimensions can be stated as follows:

1. Flexibility of Human Resources Behavior: It is "The extent to which employees have a wide treasury of behavioral texts that can be adapted to the requirements for each situation", e., if staff are able to apply these behavioral scripts appropriately under different circumstances, rather than following standard operating procedures, the organization can modify and respond to changing attitudes, thereby increasing its adaptability to the external environment (Zolin, 2011).

2. Flexible Human Resources Skill: "The number of potential alternatives uses to which an employee's skills can be applied, and how to rapidly redeploy individuals with different skills", which means that if an organization's staff has a variety of skills, they can perform different job duties on request, resulting in the organization enjoying a high degree of employee flexibility (Roca-Puig, 2014).

3. The Flexibility of Human Resources Practice: "The extent to which the organization's human resources practices can be adapted and applied across a variety of situations, or through different locations or units of the organization, and how quickly such adaptation and application can be made", means that organizations with this type of flexibility not only create value such as achieving strategic consistency across different units and enhancing response to environmental changes, but also building a capacity that is difficult to imitate that is not replaceable (Nakha, 2019).

The Concept of Crisis Management

To learn about the nature of regulatory crises, we will present a variety of crises that can affect organizations. Regulatory crises are very uncertain situations where causes and impacts are unknown, and the likelihood of them occurring is nevertheless a significant threat to the survival of the organization and regulatory stakeholders. It is allowing little time for a sudden response by members of the organization at times, and to provide treatment that needs a decision or provision that results in a change for better or worse (Boin, 2010).

The crisis is frequent and unavoidable, but there are ways to manage or avoid the regulatory crisis due to the depth and breadth of losses that usually accompany regulatory crises. It is unrealistic to identify those effective efforts which make the Organization safe from these crises. On the contrary, simply surviving a crisis may not be a strict enough criterion for success. The term crisis has different meanings when considered, defined as: "a major threat to processes that could have negative consequences if not properly addressed (Holmgren, 2015).

Crisis management is: "A systematic attempt by members of the organization with external stakeholders to avoid crises or to manage those that occur effectively". The effectiveness of regulatory crisis management is evident when potential crises are avoided or when key stakeholders believe that the successful consequences of short- and long-term impacts of crises outweigh those of failure (Lover, 2017).

The Importance of Crisis Management

The importance of managing organizational crises has been demonstrated by the integration of some aspects of psychological, social and structural politics, and these views have not been jointly considered. Furthermore, there is a lack of joint and frank agreement on the nature and meaning of the crisis, and therefore represents the compilation and interpretation of different literature regarding its applicability to the subject of the regulatory crisis (Boin, 2010).

From the point of view of (Ibrahim, 2020): 286, the importance of managing the crisis in:

1. Using the principle of accountability, accountability and follow-up, as the crisis leads to the detection of those who fail in administrative procedures and cause financial and human losses.

2. Using the department to deal with the crisis, enabling it to address and eliminate it.

Crisis Management Objectives

Today's organizations are pursuing a range of objectives in crisis management:

1. Recognize both subjective or cognitive components as well as objective components.

2. Recognition of the complexity of the results.

Integrating previous models that have dealt only with limited aspects rather than the entire crisis management process, linking multidimensional perspectives to crisis management derived from psychosocial, political and structural technological perspectives (Ibrahim, 2020).

The Causes of the Crisis

Depending on the types of crises in organizations, the causes of crises can be explained as follows:

1. The crisis occurs when employees in an organization fail to agree with each other on existing policies at work, cross each other's borders and end up fighting among themselves.

2. Technology-based bugs and the collapse of machines in the organization lead to a crisis of unfortunate Internet accidents such as poor Internet connectivity, virus infection in computers, leading to slow computer functions, all password errors ending in a crisis (Veisea, 2014).

3. Provinces, unexpected strikes of unspecified time periods and regulatory disputes cause crises.

4. Prohibited conduct such as fraud, bribery and tampering with the organization's data and information, eventually leading to an unexpected collapse of the organization 96.

The Practical Aspect

In this research, we will address the definition of the research sample for crisis management in the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment, and then explain the results of field work through the following:

Corona Crisis Management Centers in Medical City:

Three dedicated centers in the management of the Corona crisis have been selected by the Crisis Cell Authority of the Ministry of Health and Environment and accordingly we will identify each center by:

Baghdad Teaching Hospital

Established in 1970 with a clinical staff (1000) beds, providing therapeutic, medical, surgical and educational diagnostic services in various branches of medicine, including general and women's surgery, obstetrics, esoteric, kidney disease, dialysis, heart and lung resuscitation and early detection of breast tumors, as well as outpatient skin clinics Nerve stiffness, osteoporosis, hematology, oncology and physiotherapy and family planning clinic, part of which has been dedicated to the care of Corona patients, where staff have been prepared to manage the crisis and provide all specialties for the care of Corona patients exclusively as shown in Table (1) below:

Table 1 Shows The Numbers of Staff Allocated to Crisis Management
Human Resources	Number
Doctors	22
Nurses	45
Health professions	20
Administrative	18
Total	105

Private Nursing Home Hospital

The hospital was opened in 1982 with a clinical card (249) beds and provides therapeutic and medical diagnostic services, including general, esoteric and cardiac surgery, dialysis, women's and obstetrics, catheterization and radiology departments, and this hospital was dedicated to the care of patients (Corona) where the crisis cell allocated staff according to the specialties needed to manage the crisis as described in Table (2) below: (Planning Section)

Table 2 Shows The Numbers of Staff In Isolation Centers
Human Resources	Number
Doctors	9
Nurses	30
sedation	6
Health professions	14
Administrative	8
Total	67

Dar Al-Shifa

Founded in 2017 under the Certificate of Incorporation (M.S. 2950) issued by the registration of companies in Iraq - in the name of Dar Al-Shifa Medical Tourism and International Medical Public Services in Baghdad (Planning Department).

This hospital has been allocated to intensive care for Corona patients, where the crisis cell has allocated staff according to the necessary terms of reference to manage the crisis as shown in table (3) below:

Table 3 Shows The Numbers Of Staff In Isolation Centers
Human Resources	Number
Doctors	9
Nurses	66
Pharmacists	18
Health professions	54
Administrative	23
Total	170

Testing Research Hypotheses

In this research, we will examine the main and subsidiary research hypotheses through which we will demonstrate the extent to which the correlation between human resource flexibility and crisis management is linked, and then indicate the relationship between each dimension of human resources flexibility in crisis management, and we will clarify the impact relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable, as well as the relationship of impact between dimensions in the following.

1. Testing the Correlation between Human Resource Flexibility and Crisis Management:

The results of the first variable "Human Resource Flexibility" and the second variable "Crisis Management" showed the correlation between the research variables in table (4) a moral correlation between the first variable "human resource flexibility" and the second variable "crisis management", the value of the correlation (703.) and this value Moral and very strong, as it reached moral (0.000) according to the results (correlations) which is greater than moral (0.05) and the result allows the acceptance of the first research hypothesis which states (there is a relationship of statistically significant moral correlation between the flexibility of human resources and crisis management).

Table 4 Pearson Coefficient
Minion	Crisis Management
Independent
Human resource flexibility	703.

2. The Third Key Hypothesis Test is the Relationship of Influence between Human Resource Flexibility and Crisis Management:

The results showed that there is a very strong and moral impact, which indicates that the flexibility of human resources has a significant role to play in influencing crisis management in medical city hospitals, a result that provides sufficient support to accept the research hypothesis of "the impact of human resources flexibility in crisis management” as in table (5) below:

Table 5 Analysis Of The Impact Of Human Resource Resilience In Crisis Management
MinionIndependent	Crisis Management Y
	A	B	F	R2	Itself
Human Resources Resilience X	703.	720.	203.45	494.	0.000
Source: Researcher Preparation, Program (Spss Ver.21)/Moral level (0,000)/210=N

In the light of this hypothesis, the impact relationship was formulated for the positive variable (crisis management), which represents the value of (Y) and the interpretive variable (human resources flexibility) representing (X). The equation of linear regression was: ( ), while the values of the equivalency of the slope show the above table the value (F) calculated at (203.45), at a moral level (00) 000) and confidence limits (99%), which means that the flexibility of human resources affects crisis management. The table above shows the flexibility of human resources by (A) value (703.) this indicates that a change in the amount of (1) in human resource flexibility will lead to a change in crisis management and the value of the identification factor (494.)= this means that (50%) of the disparities in crisis management is the variation in the interpretation of the human resources flexibility that entered the model, and that (720). It is a discrepancy explained by factors that did not enter the model of decline, as the table points to the morale that has emerged by (0,000) which is an affirmation of a high and moral impact of the flexibility of human resources in crisis management, and this confirms the validity of the third main hypothesis.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Conclusions

The findings of the research will be presented and discussed from the theoretical, applied and statistical reality of field data that can be used in the sample researched, as well as can be used by scholars and researchers, so they will be identified in the following points:

1. The results of the research on the practical side showed a lack of training courses for employees. Training programs are limited to specific categories and many others are neglected, and training courses are not held for new staff or those transferred from health institutions to health isolation centers and hospitals.

2. The results showed that staff could not accomplish a set of tasks assigned to them as they were very weak, indicating that they were unable to accomplish tasks in the period of sudden crises.

3. It turns out that hospitals in The City of Medicine do not rotate employees between jobs because they are very inefficient, making it difficult for them to adapt to various jobs, as well as not knowing the controls and procedures of work.

4. The results showed that staff did not have the capacity and competence as they were very weak, so they could not face problems and the difficulty of solving them and discovering their causes.

5. The results showed that specialization did not match the capabilities of staff significantly, thus resulting in their skills and experience in managing unexpected crises not being utilized.

6. It was found that staff payments were not linked to the level of performance despite their high evaluation, which was very weak, thus resulting in staff dissatisfaction with management and difficulty in dealing with crisis management.

7. It turns out that the process of communication is not carried out accurately and continuously with the authorities where it came very weak, which may lead to harm to the lives of citizens, as well as the difficulty of constantly following the developments of the crisis.

8. The results showed that hospitals were unable to equip all human resources, which were very weak and therefore could not deal with sudden or emergency cases of the unexpected crisis.

9. The results in personal information showed statistically significant differences (0%) It indicates that there is no medical diploma in specialization, which is one of the constraints of crisis management in corona crisis cell hospitals and centers.

Recommendations

A set of recommendations has been reached through the research that can be used by Scholars and researchers, in addition to which they can be used in the sample researched "City of Medicine - Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment", as described in the following:

1. Training courses should be provided to staff for human resources courses, and training courses should be conducted primarily for new staff or those transferred from health institutions to health isolation centers and hospitals.

2. Staff tasks in the area of unexpected crises need to be defined without other tasks, so that they can manage and control the current crisis.

3. Hospitals in The City of Medicine should seek to rotate staff between jobs, so that they can be adapted to the various positions assigned to them, as well as know the controls and procedures of work.

4. Staff must have the capacity and competence to cope with, solve and discover the causes of problems by testing them in various jobs before a crisis, and developing their skills in managing expected and unexpected crises.

5. The management of research centers should adopt the principle of putting the right person in the right place, so that they can invest the capabilities and skills of employees and benefit from their expertise by establishing recruitment controls to ensure that this is achieved.

6. The need to allocate additional wages or financial incentives that encourage staff to deal with the current crisis, thus resulting in staff satisfaction with senior management and easy handling of crisis management.

7. Hospitals in The City of Medicine should adopt crisis cell instructions to deal with sudden crises, as well as abide by the instructions of the senior management of the hospital as it deems appropriate to manage the crisis.

8. The need to provide a special program to manage the process of communication accurately and continuously with the authorized authorities, which leads to the containment of the current crisis, as well as the ease of constantly following the developments of the crisis.

9. Hospitals must equip all human resources that deal with sudden or emergency situations of the unexpected and anticipated crisis.

10. The need to provide a medical diploma in Corona crisis management hospitals in order to deal with them easily, as well as to reduce the work pressures of current staff from other disciplines.

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