Leadership in times of crisis: A systematic review

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Leadership in times of crisis: A systematic review

July 2020 Jian Ding Student number: S3779890 j.ding@student.rug.nl Masters Thesis

MSc. Business Administration - Change Management Faculty of Economics and Business

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Abstract

Purpose - Leadership plays a critically important role for organisational performance, particularly in times of organisational crisis. The purpose of this study is to chart the current intellectual composition of leadership studies in a crisis context by investigating the key themes, concepts, and their relationship for the period 2011– 2020. The study updates the previous investigation by James et al. (2011) to reflect the developments in the field.

Method - This is a systematic review of the management literature, consisting of 65 articles concerning leadership studies in a crisis context.

Findings - The analysis identifies two key themes that help to track the direction of leadership research in times of crisis: leadership styles, and leadership competencies. Leadership styles are grouped into four categories: directive leadership, empowering leadership, transactional leadership, and transformational leadership. Leadership competencies are presented in three themes: sensemaking, decision making, and emotional management. Differences and commonalities of leadership styles and competencies among studies are discussed between four different types of crises in terms of Coombs and Holladay’s (1996) crisis typologies: accidents; transgressions; faux pas; and terrorism. A few methodological observations are also made into the extant literature.

Conclusion - The paper provides an extensive review of research into leadership in a crisis context to date and highlights areas where further investigation would be potentially rewarding. This study will help scholars to improve the understanding of the evolution of leadership studies in a crisis context and identifying available avenues for future research.

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INTRODUCTION

Leadership plays a critically important role for organisational performance (Dvir, Eden, Avolio, & Shamir, 2002; Howell & Avolio, 1993; Srivastava, Bartol, & Locke, 2006; Yukl, 2008) particularly in times of organisational crisis (Pearson & Clair, 1998; Waldman, Ramirez, House & Puranam, 2001). Leadership in an organisational crisis is often hypothesized as the process of exercising social influence for change (Mumford, Freidrich, Caughron, & Byrne, 2007). James and Wooten (2010) defined the crisis as “a rare, significant, and public situation that creates highly undesirable outcomes for the firm and its stakeholders... and requires immediate corrective action by firm leaders (p. 17)”. With this, they highlight three aspects that differentiate a crisis from regular business problems: rarity and significance of the event, and the level of impact on stakeholders (James & Wooten, 2010).

Crises in one form or another have influenced and will continue to influence organisations and render them vulnerable or even destroy them. The still recent global financial crisis (GFC) saw a near-collapse of the western financial system with the demise of some Wall Street giants and important financial institutions in other countries; the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill caused one of the largest environmental and organisational disaster with human casualties. Other natural disasters, terrorism, political upheaval, and pandemic threats all adversely affect the business community to various degrees. Faced with an unprecedented crisis such as the COVID‐19 pandemic, we see leadership defined in real-time. The actions leaders are taking now will shape our economies for years to come. Crisis presents a profound challenge to both practitioners and academics (Boin, Ekengren, & Rhinard, 2020).

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severity. Acknowledging the challenges of conducting crisis research, they propose new methodological approaches and new research questions with a specific focus on leadership during a crisis (James et al., 2011).

Although the literature has produced broad concepts on leadership in crisis context with an emphasis on transformational and charismatic leadership approaches (e.g., Halverson, Murphy, & Riggio, 2004; Pearson & Clair, 1998), there is little scholarly attention about the specifics of how leaders effectively respond to a crisis (Wooten & James, 2008), or how crisis affect leader behaviour. James et al. (2011) call for scholars to “move toward investigating more complex relationships that incorporate multiple variables connected to business crises and leader behaviour with respect to managing such crises” (p. 459).

Considering the crucial role that leadership plays from increasing organisational preparedness against a crisis, through handling crisis, to maintaining post-crisis reputation and recovery, coupled with how intricate relationships and mechanisms that influences leader behaviour in a crisis context is under-researched (James et al., 2011), it is theoretically and empirically significant to examine leadership under a crisis in depth. Taking James et al. (2011) as a starting point, the purpose of this paper is to review recent literature in an attempt to describe the development and expansion of conceptual and empirical work on leadership and develop a more complete and nuanced understanding on the broad range of topics that reflect leadership in a crisis context.

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METHODS

To provide a comprehensive overview of leadership studies in a crisis context, I conducted a systematic literature review. A systematic search should include a relatively complete census of relevant literature (Webster & Watson, 2002). To develop evidence-informed management knowledge and ensure that the body of literature to be included in this review was broad and rigorous enough, I followed established procedures of conducting systematic reviews (e.g., Tranfield, Denyer, & Smart, 2003; Webster & Watson, 2002). This included systemic search by using the international electronic database Web of Science, based on key terms including leader*, crisis, disaster, disruption, turmoil, and upheaval. I also extended the methodology by exploring additional research that cited the benchmark article. Overall, I sought to collect the research that is most relevant to management and organisational scholars.

Search strategy

I conducted the initial search in the Web of Science Core Collection database. In the Web of Science, I selected the field topic. The topic field covered the search in the titles, abstracts, author keywords, and keywords. In addition, I used James et al. (2011)’s The Academy of

Management Annals article as a benchmark and the starting point of my search, thus the review

covers the time period from 2011 up to May 2020.

Searches using key terms Crisis and Crises generate the same results. Searches using key terms lead* AND crisis generate 226 more articles than that of leader* AND crisis, ceteris paribus. I went through all the titles of these articles and occasionally the abstract and found only one article that is relevant to my research topic. Therefore, I included that article into the review and decided to use search term leader* instead of lead*.

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AND upheaval. In addition, I also explored additional studies that cited the benchmark article. The search strategy is shown in table 1 below and elaborated in the following section.

Search strategy

Search terms

# articles

TS=(leader* AND crisis) 2714

TS=(leader* AND disaster) 793

TS=(leader* AND disruption) 364

TS=(leader* AND turmoil) 73

TS=(leader* AND upheaval) 73

Citations of the benchmark article 53

Total abstracts and titles reviewed 4070 Total abstracts and titles minus duplicates 3802

Refined by CATEGORIES: (MANAGEMENT) 453

First selection 109

Second selection 67

Final selection 65

Table 1. Search strategy

Selection criteria

Before the search, I defined criteria to include or exclude papers from the review. Specifically, I only included papers that were 1) focused on the broad range of topics that reflect leadership in a crisis context, 2) published in peer-reviewed journals and 3) full-text of articles available online, 4) written in English, 5) To make effective use of scientific evidence (Rousseau, Manning, & Denyer, 2008), only primary studies were included for this review. Therefore, editorials and reviews are excluded. Due to the time limitation of this research, books are also excluded from this review. Because I am interested in the advancement of studies specifically in the management field, only studies in this category are included.

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For example, Brandert and Matkin’s (2019) phenomenological study of women in leadership was excluded because their study centred on the personal crisis. Another paper, Junzi

leadership in Singapore: governance and human capital development focus on how a

Confucian-inspired leadership style informs initiatives toward human capital development (Le Queux & Kuah, 2020). Although this study draws from a 10-year longitudinal review of Singapore industrial relations and human resource development policies after the GFC, its analysis does not inform any knowledge on the relationship between leadership and a crisis context, thus was excluded. In addition, a few papers investigate the effect of the GFC on the development of corporate governance (Martin & Gollan, 2012; Srivastava, 2015; Zheng & Ho, 2012), they are also excluded from this review for a lack of analysis on the broad range of topics that reflect leadership.

I also conducted a quality assessment for empirical studies using an adapted version from the Standard Quality Assessment Criteria for Evaluating Primary Research Papers (Kmet, Lee, & Cook, 2004). For conceptual papers, I relied on the implicit quality rating of the journal. Assessment is done by rating how well a particular criterion has been addressed, using a rating scale of 2 (completely addressed), 1 (partly addressed), or 0 (not addressed). Articles are included if they score 50% or higher of the total amount of points possible (Kmet et al., 2004). In the case of a mixed-method study, both questionnaires are used. The assessment criteria for qualitative and quantitative research are listed respectively in table 2 below.

Criteria qualitative studies Criteria quantitative studies 1. Question/objective sufficiently

described?

1. Question/objective sufficiently described?

2. Study design evident and appropriate? 2. Study design evident and appropriate? 3. Context for the study clear? 3. Method of subject/comparison group

selection or source of information/input variables described and appropriate? 4. Connection to a theoretical

framework/wider body of knowledge?

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5. Sampling strategy described, relevant and justified?

5. Outcome and (if applicable) exposure measure(s) well defined and robust to measurement/misclassification bias? Means of assessment reported? 6. Data collection methods clearly

described and systematic?

6. Sample size appropriate? 7. Data analysis clearly described and

systematic?

7. Analytic methods described/justified and appropriate?

8. Use of verification procedure(s) to establish credibility?

8. Some estimate of variance is reported for the main results?

9. Conclusions supported by the results? 9. Controlled for confounding?

10. Results reported in sufficient detail? 11. Conclusions supported by the results? Table 2. Quality assessment criteria

Search result

The initial search resulted in a total of 4,070 articles. By leveraging the Web of Science search history’s combine set “OR” function, I excluded 268 duplicate articles. I then refined the initial search by applying management in the category section, which filtered out studies in fields such as political science, international relations, or urban planning. Following that, I analysed the remaining 453 titles and abstracts to ensure the articles cover research questions that are relevant to leadership and crisis context. In cases when I was not sure if the article should be included or not, I read the full article to make an assessment. After this round of selection, a further 344 articles were excluded. I then read through the remaining 109 articles and selected the most relevant studies that suited the purpose of this review. After this round of selection, 67 articles made it to the list for the quality assessment. As noted in the previous section, I used an adapted version of the established framework to evaluate the quality of papers (Kmet et al., 2004).

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the social interactions of individuals or very small groups, on constructs and variables such as leadership approach, leader traits, emotion, affect, and competencies. In terms of methodology, surprisingly, the majority of the studies, 53, are empirical, with 23 qualitative studies, 22 quantitative studies, and 8 mixed-method studies. And only 12 studies are solely based on theory.

Knowledge Type Count Percentage

Theoretical 12 18%

Empirical 53 82%

Total: 65 100%

Methodology Count Percentage

Qualitative 23 43%

Quantitative 22 42%

Mixed 8 15%

Total: 53 100%

Table 3 in the appendix offers an overview of the articles included in the review.

Data extraction

After the selection process, the selected articles are characterized by author, journal, research objective, type of research, and data collection to gain more insight into the nature of these studies. This information was extracted and consolidated in Table 3.

Data analysis

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FINDINGS

Based on data analysis, the findings are presented in four sections: types of crises; leadership styles, leadership competencies, and methodological observations. Different types of crises present different challenges and consequences for leaders, therefore calls for different kinds of leadership styles and handling of leadership competencies. Crises also put on an aggregated layer of difficulty for leadership research, but scholars have found novel ways to acquire data.

Types of crises

Business crises is distinctive from other challenges an organisation and its leadership may face for the rarity, the significance of the event, and the level of impact on stakeholders (James et al., 2011). James et al. (2011) posit that typology offers “reference for managers and offers guidance in making decisions under circumstances in which standard operating procedures are insignificant or irrelevant” (p.469). To better understand the underlying variables and mechanisms and how they are related in the context of crisis, I categorised the reviewed literature in terms of Coombs and Holladay’s (1996) crisis typologies: accidents; transgressions; faux pas; and terrorism. Note though this typology, as are others proposed by scholars, is not exhaustive and complete.

Figure 1. Types of crisis distribution by level of analysis

Accident as a crisis results from the actions of the organisation, but the crisis consequence is not intended by the action (Coombs & Holladay, 1996). The reviewed literature studied

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accidents such as airplane crash (Berthod & Mueller-Seitz, 2018; Jong et al., 2016), mine collapse (Useem et al., 2011), and product failure (Cowen & Montgomery, 2020). The research objectives in this group are quite diverse, but they all discuss leadership attributions on the micro-level. Leaders in accidents are challenged with making sense and critical decisions out of an unexpected situation to maintain and develop resilience or even to save lives.

Transgression as a crisis results from actions of the organisation, and the crisis-inducing action is intentional due to factors such as moral or ethical failures and poor oversight (Coombs & Holladay, 1996). The reviewed literature studied top management neglection (Case et al., 2015), malfeasance (Gruber et al., 2015; Snoeijers & Poels, 2018; TenBrink, 2019) and destructive or narcissistic behaviours (Fors Brandebo, 2020; Stein, 2013) that resulted in organisational crisis. These studies also investigate leadership attributions on the micro-level, but because the nature of the crisis situation stem from intentional actions from within the organisation, the foci of the studies in this category are the delineation of harmful leader behaviour and individual perception, either within or outside of the organisation, of leader behaviour as well as the crisis situation.

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conditions to effectively distribute leadership within this process. With regard to organisational crises caused by unintended external influences, the literature has shown divergent steams of topics. Nonetheless, scholars in this category have examined the challenges leaders face during difficult economic times, such as enable organisational learning and development, activate resilience, and to maintain employee contribution.

Terrorism as a crisis results from intentional crisis-inducing actions taken from outside of the organisation (Coombs & Holladay, 1996). This literature covers two real crisis scenarios: a terrorist attack (Birkeland et al., 2017), a hostage situation (Alvinius et al., 2015), and a fictional zombie apocalypse (Buchanan & Hallgren, 2019). This kind of crisis is usually associated with emotional trauma, therefore researches in this category show how leaders manage their own and others’ emotions and how related leadership configurations evolve during a crisis.

As organisations continue to increase in complexity, it is impossible to distinguish and create crisis typologies that suit every crisis context. For example, Kornberger et al., (2019) have focused on the sensemaking and decision-making aspect due to situational uncertainty while a refugee crisis unfolds. It is difficult to categorize a refugee crisis as it can be caused either internally or externally, intentional or unintentional. In the reviewed articles, some focus on the process of crisis management in general terms and could potentially be placed in all of the crisis situations accounted in Coombs and Holladay’s (1996) crisis typologies. For example, Koenig et al. (2020) theoretically analyse CEO empathy and expect it to be a relevant factor for nearly any crisis. Therefore, those articles are categorized under “all” shown in the above figure.

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and demands on leaders. It is therefore not so surprising that research in these diverse contexts has studied similar leadership attributes which can be grouped into two themes: leadership style and leadership competencies.

Leadership styles

All leaders have a signature style that sets them apart in their approach to leading an organisation (Bowers, Hall, & Srinivasan, 2017). Although there is no one-style-fits-all solution in leading an organisation out of a crisis situation, placing the wrong leader can engender an unfortunate result (Fors Brandebo, 2020). Leadership styles have been classified in a number of ways to capture actual leadership with a conceptual representation (Pearce et al., 2003), many studies attempt to examine which leadership style is more suited under crisis conditions (e.g. Fernandez & Shaw, 2020; Liu et al., 2017; Williams et al. 2019). There are many identified leadership approaches in the reviewed articles which can be grouped as directive leadership (e.g. Stoker et al., 2019; Uhr, 2017), empowering leadership (e.g. Birkeland et al., 2017; Marques-Quinteiro et al., 2019), transactional leadership (e.g. Bhaduri, 2019; Sheaffer & Brender-Ilan, 2014), and transformational leadership (e.g. Haddon et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2012), according to a recent model of leadership (Pearce et al., 2003) based on historical analysis of classic leadership theory and research.

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Some studies suggest that transformational leadership is more suited for a crisis scenario. Using two psychological states, locus of control, and impulsive sensation-seeking as predictors of managers’ rationalisations of the occurrence of crises, Sheaffer and Brender-Ilan (2014) explore the relationship between leadership styles and crisis preparedness. They find that transformational leaders are more crisis-prepared as they are less likely to engage in crisis rationalisations; whereas transactional leaders appear to endorse crisis rationalisations and hence more crisis-prone. Operationalizing another cognitive variable, positive and negative affect, as a predictor of resilience, Sommer et al. (2016) examine how the team leaders’ leadership style influences the resilience of team members during a crisis. The results of their study suggest that transformational leadership behaviours are associated with higher levels of positive affect and lower levels of negative affect, which in turn relate to higher resilience among team members (Sommer et al., 2016). In contrast, transactional leadership behaviours indirectly weaken the resilience of team members. Transformational leaders are adaptive and are capable of strategically drawing from different opinions and experiences to inspire people to work together effectively. However, it takes time to make sense of a situation and build consensus (Bowers et al., 2017), which is why transformational leadership may be the most appropriate during a crisis when systems and structures allow leaders to obtain information quickly and accurately. In contrast, transactional leaders are bound by rules and regulations (Bowers et al., 2017), therefore they are less suited to manage the team dynamics during emerging crisis situations.

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also observes more transformational leadership during and post-crisis, whereas transactional or directive leadership is more prominent in the pre-crisis phase. Exploring leadership competencies during times of catastrophic crises, Van Wart and Kapucu (2011) find evidence that strong decisive leadership with transactional characteristics was more effective than consultative and transformational competencies due to time constraints. Directive leadership can be very effective in crisis situations as it facilitates quick decisions. Nevertheless, such a leadership style may hinder initiatives in crisis situations that require flexibility or innovative effort (Bowers et al., 2017).

Other studies find that that empowering leadership contributes to positive staff relationships, consistent employee contributions, and job satisfaction (Liu et al., 2017; Marques-Quinteiro et al., 2019; Pelser et al., 2016). Marques-Quinteiro et al. (2019) find that this leadership style encourages positive employee attitudes and behaviours, increases individual adaptive performance, and job satisfaction, therefore offset employee turnover and loss of customers that often occur during a period of crisis.

However, Haddon et al. (2015) argue that desired leadership competencies are too complex and nuanced to suggest what specific leadership style is ideal in a crisis context. Their findings together with previous studies (e.g. Wooten & James, 2008), also indicate that the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire which is commonly used in leadership research to measures a broad range of leadership types may “not be effective in measuring and capturing leadership across contexts” (Haddon et al., 2015:623). There appears to be a need to create a leadership measurement tool that can capture leader characteristics and behaviour tailored to a crisis context.

Leadership competencies

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McCabe, 2015; Uhr, 2017). Faced with a crisis, leaders cannot act as they have before, as their prior practice may well have contributed to the failures that led to the crisis or have failed to respond effectively to the crisis. During crisis events, leaders must guide organisation members by making sense of events, making effective decisions, and dealing with emotions and social dynamics. I identified three essential leadership competencies in the reviewed literature: sensemaking, decision making and emotional management.

Sensemaking is an essential activity to organizing in a crisis where people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous and unexpected (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). One of the key tasks for leaders in such situations is to develop a mental model to understand and respond to the crisis (Weick, 1995). Sensemaking under crises is an iterative process that involves information processing, communication, and problem solving (Weick et al., 2005), which are likely to be influenced by the followers. Many articles have focused on the cognitive process of leaders and followers facing a crisis (e. g. Berthod & Mueller-Seitz, 2018; Carrington et al., 2019).

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investigate this process between leader and follower (e. g. Berthod & Mueller-Seitz, 2018; Kornberger et al., 2019).

Carrington et al. (2019) analysed the cognitive maps of leaders and followers to investigate how consensus is formed. They find that organisational crises can augment an active exchange between the mental models of leaders and followers and suggest that followers are not just passive and obedient receivers and may have just as much influence on leaders than leaders on followers (Carrington et al., 2019). Their main findings confirm that followers can play a central role in the process of developing consensus and agreement on how to solve a crisis over time. Their data demonstrate that during slowly evolving organisational crises, shared mental models can emerge in follower teams before the leadership and followers are the initial locus of consensus rather than leaders (Carrington et al., 2019). The convergence in mental models also reflect that higher cognitive shifts occur in leaders as leaders' vision for the resolution to the crisis slowly change to that of the initial shared mental model held by followers (Carrington et al., 2019). How leaders making sense of a crisis affect how they make decisions in handling a crisis.

The ability to make quality decisions is considered as a defining aspect of leadership (Yukl, 1989). The literature demonstrates that certain types of organisations, for example military troupes and naval crew, allow and empower their staff to make decisions (e.g. Fernandez & Shaw, 2020; Marko, et al., 2020) while other organisations prefer to centralize decision making (e.g. Martin & Gollan, 2012; Schmidt & Groeneveld, 2019). However, there is a trend in the literature that support involving followers in the decision-making process in civil organisations facing crisis (e.g. Fernandez & Shaw, 2020; Williams et al., 2019).

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independently with a breakdown in communication (Gabrielli et al., 2020; Marko, et al., 2020). In this context, the most efficient response to a crisis rely on the competence and not on the title or position one holds, therefore decisional autonomy is crucial for those organisations. Characteristically, bottom-up learning, a process where lower-level staff collect information and communicate their opinions to top managers, is encouraged in military organisations to make decisions (Gabrielli et al., 2020). Differently, within civil organisations, leaders usually have access to crisis-related information, and hierarchy mandate that a decision has to have the consent of the top management, or it is often made by leaders without consulting followers at all (Fors Brandebo, 2020).

However, this is not always the best method to lead an organisation facing crisis. Fernandez & Shaw (2020) claim that distributing leadership responsibilities improve the quality of the decisions as multiple perspectives are involved in the decision-making process. Also, in a coordinated network, staff who felt they could equally participate in decision making did report a better coordination within the network (Nolte et al., 2012). Good decision making in a crisis can lead an organisation towards a more successful path to mitigate loss and discover opportunity, meanwhile, there is another aspect of crisis management a leader must take into consideration to ensure organisational effectiveness: emotional management.

Crisis such as the global financial crisis or a terrorist attack at workplace may induce devastating effects on the employees' physical and psychosocial well-being. Evidence (e.g. Alvinius et al., 2015; Kaplan et al., 2013; Koenig et al., 2020) suggest that effective emotional management can influence organisational resilience and employees' ability to recover from workplace trauma, so understanding how leaders deal with emotions and social dynamics helps develop leaders to lead their employees and organisations through a crisis.

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comprises cognitive (perspective taking), emotional (susceptibility to emotional contagion), and behavioural (empathic concern) tendencies that trigger people to understand, relate and care for people in distress. Therefore, they regard empathy as powerful driver of CEOs’ crisis management, compared with other emotion-related constructs such as emotional intelligence and emotion regulation. Similarly, Sommer et al. (2016) operationalise affect as persisting emotions and temporary moods that can influence cognitive flexibility and well-being under stress. They find the relationship between team leader behaviour and followers’ resilience was mediated by the affective states of those followers. Specifically, leaders who envision a positive future, expressing confidence in team members’ abilities to meet high expectations, and conveying shared values are likely to engender “higher levels of positive affect and lower levels of negative affect among team members, which in turn relate to higher resilience” (Sommer et al., 2016: 191). Additionally, Kaplan et al. (2013) operationalise affect as a personal trait, a more enduring characteristic, rather than a state or a transient mood. They examine the impact of team member dispositional positive affect on team crisis effectiveness and their analysis suggest that that homogeneity in positive affect leads to higher team effectiveness. This effect was achieved through reducing the amount of negative emotions that team members experience during crises (Kaplan et al., 2013).

Methodological observations

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increasingly important for leaders to respond to these unforeseen problems effectively. Even though the stakes of these business problems do not reach so high as the level of a crisis, the best leadership practises that help produce successful results in a crisis pay off when leaders engage in the uncertainty and complexity of normal times as well. Therefore, despite the challenges, scholars have come up with many opportunities, mechanisms and innovative ways to study leadership phenomenon in a crisis.

Many studies have used media and social media reports as point of analysis (e.g. Elliott & Stead, 2018; Gruber et al., 2015). Likewise, data in the form of annual reports, leaders’ speeches, quotations and even film prove to be worthwhile in crisis leadership studies (e.g. Buchanan & Hallgren, 2019; You & Yu, 2019). Surveys and questionnaires are frequently used in quantitative research and may reveal variables and relationships that are interesting for investigation (James et al., 2011). For example, Sommer, Howell, & Hadley (2016) use employee surveys to examine how team leaders’ behaviours influence the resilience of team members during a crisis. Interview and case study are both important qualitative research method. Case study fits particularly well in studying crisis for its propensity to yield meaningful scholarly insights and organisational implications (James et al., 2011). It is no surprise that ten reviewed studies adopted this particular approach and eight studies in this review used interview as the means of data collection.

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DISCUSSION

In the discussion section, I provide an overview of the research landscape concerning leadership in times of crisis, explain further the theoretical and practical contributions, go through some of the limitations of the review, and suggest directions for future research.

Overview of literature

The discussion of leadership in times of crisis has carried on for a few decades before James et al. (2011) published their review on crisis leadership. For example, some scholars have put their research emphasis on crisis, studying sense-making or interpretation of crises (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010; Weick, 1988), exploring decision-making as a fundamental aspect of crisis handling (Anderson, 1983; Rosenthal & Kouzmin, 1997; Tjosvold, 1984), investigating how leaders effectively deploy resources (Yun, Faraj, & Sims, 2005), and delineating factors that affect leaders to adopt a ‘crisis as opportunity’ view (Brockner & James, 2008) to cope with one. Other scholars have placed leadership itself as the focus, dissecting the effects of charismatic leadership on followers (Hunt, Boal, & Dodge, 1999) and the association between crisis and charisma (Bligh, Kohles, & Pillai, 2005; Williams, Pillai, Lowe, Jung, & Herst, 2009), and analysing what type of leadership is appropriate for crisis events (Chambers, Drysdale, & Hughes, 2010).

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Nearly half of the reviewed articles were published in the last three years, indicating an increasing interest and a growing need to study this topic.

Generally speaking, leadership studies in the majority are conceptual and concern theory building and development. Therefore, it is striking and encouraging that nearly eighty percent of the reviewed studies are empirical with qualitative and quantitative methods nearly evenly distributed. These studies provide solid knowledge base to better prepare leaders to be more crisis savvy. The extant literature mainly focuses on the leadership attributes during the crisis and post-crisis phase, and investigates the leadership phenomenon on a micro-level, mostly individual based. Only a small number of articles addressed the complex leadership relationship on higher levels, even then, only a couple articles studied inter-organisational leadership phenomenon in crises. As crisis events become increasingly borderless, there is a pressing need to study leadership in the context of global crises. More attention can be given to the strategizing and planning in the pre-crisis phase.

Future research

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event, planning and training are crucial in providing the cognitive infrastructure that warrants adaptive learning and reliable performance (Weick et al., 1999). A promising topic of further investigation represents factors and mechanisms that enhance leaders’ ability to strategize and plan for crisis events.

The reviewed literature has theoretically developed and empirically investigated how positive leadership is enacted in a crisis scenario. They have extended our understanding of factors such as leaders’ positive affect (Sommer et al., 2016), empathy (Koenig et al., 2020) leaders’ emotional control and the quality of leader-member exchange (Zhang et al., 2012) that contribute to employee psychological safety which is crucial to achieving resilience during crisis events. However, little research has investigated the tenacity of a leader as to how she sustains herself through significant times coupled with episodes of stress and keeps herself motivated as a leader in a time of crisis. In other words, what elements and mechanisms contribute to the tenacity of a leader in times of crisis events?

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leadership facilitate such collaboration. Future research can look into factors such as the power dynamics, information sharing and decision making during such collaboration.

Drawing upon the inputs of the reviewed articles and the gaps identified above, I propose four areas of consideration for future scholarship development in this field.

• Factors and mechanisms that enhance leaders’ ability to strategize and plan for crisis events. • Elements and mechanisms contribute to the tenacity of a leader in times of crisis events. • Leadership styles and competencies that facilitate leaders to manage a global crisis across

geographic boundaries.

• Variables and mechanisms of leadership that enable cross-sectoral or cross-organisational collaboration in times of crisis.

Research limitations

This research has some limitations that future research in this field should take into consideration. The first limitation lies with the search strategy used. Although I have used quite a few keywords in the search, I might have missed some articles if different and more terminologies were used. The second limitation lies in the selection criteria. The inclusion criteria of only peer-reviewed articles written in English language may have also excluded other potentially informative research. Another limitation in the search is the categoric exclusion of studies other than management studies. As such, this review may not be representative of all the relevant work in the field.

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CONCLUSION

Evidently, business crises are likely to become more in frequency and intensity. Those crises events bring increasing uncertainty, complexity, and change to organisations. Leadership plays a critical role in guiding organisations to navigate through uncertainty and change. It is therefore important for the scholarship to keep up to not only learn from but also inform practicing communities (James et al., 2011). While previous work has made considerable contributions to our understanding of the complex relationships associated with leadership and business crises, there are many aspects scholars can work on to develop this field of study. In this systematic review, I have made an effort to categorize 65 articles concerning leadership studies in times of crisis. The analysis identifies two key themes that help to track the direction of leadership research in times of crisis: leadership styles, and leadership competencies. Differences and commonalities of leadership styles and competencies among studies are discussed between four different types of crises in terms of Coombs and Holladay’s (1996) crisis typologies: accidents; transgressions; faux pas; and terrorism. A few methodological observations are also made into the extant literature.

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APPENDIX

Table 3. Overview of reviewed articles

No. Year Author Publication Purpose of study Knowledge

type Methodology Data collection

1 2011 (Brookes,

2011) Leadership

To identify the barriers to, and critical success factors of, new public leadership.

Theoretical Other Analysis of seminar series 2 2011 (Hadley, Pittinsky, Sommer, & Zhu, 2011) Leadership Quarterly

To develop a scale measure of leader efficacy to assess information and make decisions in a public health and safety crisis, to validate the measure, and to use the measure to explore the nature of crisis leader efficacy.

Empirical Quantitative Surveys

3 2011

(Kerr & Robinson, 2011)

Leadership

To investigate the apparent auto-destructive behaviour of the leaders of the Scottish banks in the period 2005–2008.

Empirical Qualitative

Analysis of academic articles, media reports and other contemporary sources 4 2011 (Probert & James, 2011) Leadership

address two different types of crises: a crisis in the leadership

development literature and the pragmatic challenges facing organizations.

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5 2011 (Useem, Jordan, & Koljatic, 2011) MIT Sloan Management Review

To study leadership decisions made during a crisis and explore how individuals handle major challenges not previously experienced.

Empirical Qualitative Analysis of media reports 6 2011 (Van Wart & Kapucu, 2011) Public Management Review

To explore the specific competencies emphasized in crisis management situations, focusing on the response and, to some degree, the recovery phases.

Empirical Mixed Surveys

7 2011 (Vessey, Barrett, & Mumford, 2011) Leadership Quarterly

To explore leader cognition during crises and identify strategies that may increase leader performance during crises and further investigate situational factors that may influence the effect of these strategies on leader performance.

Empirical Quantitative Experiment study

8 2012 (Davis & Gardner, 2012) Leadership Quarterly

To investigate the influence of crisis

on leader use of charismatic rhetoric. Empirical Quantitative

Analysis of a presidential speech 9 2012 (Gartzia, Ryan, Balluerka, & Aritzeta, 2012) European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

To further investigate the presence of a ‘‘think crisis–think female’’

relationship and to explore more exhaustively its underlying processes.

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10 2012 (Martin & Gollan, 2012) International Journal of Human Resource Management

To analyse the role played by HRM and leadership in the rise and

spectacular failure of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Empirical Qualitative Case study

11 2012 (Nolte, Martin, & Boenigk, 2012) Public Management Review

To identify the factors that influence network coordination in disaster settings, and to analyse differences in network coordination across different types and sizes of aid organizations.

Theoretical Quantitative Surveys

12 2012 (Ulmer, 2012) Management Communicatio n Quarterly To advance a multidisciplinary approach for increasing the impact of thought leadership in crisis

communication.

Theoretical Other N/A

13 2012 (Zhang, Jia, & Gu, 2012) International Journal of Human Resource Management

To investigate the underlying relationship between

transformational leadership and leadership effectiveness in a crisis situation.

Empirical Mixed Interviews and serveys 14 2013 (Kahn, Barton, & Fellows, 2013) Academy of Management Review To conceptualize organizational crises in terms of relational

disturbance and crisis management as the repair of such disturbances.

15 2013 (Kaplan, Laport, & Waller, 2013) Journal of Organizational Behavior

To examine the impact of team member dispositional positive affect (PA) on team crisis effectiveness and the role of felt negative emotion in transmitting that influence.

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16 2013 (Selart, Johansen, & Nesse, 2013) Journal of Business Ethics

To investigate how crisis prevention plans influence employees' reactions in terms of risk perception and well-being.

Empirical Quantitative Questionnaires

17 2013 (Stein, 2013)

Journal of Management Inquiry

To offer a new approach, a

theoretical framework, to refrain the narcissistic leaders debate and delineate through a leadership example at Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis.

18 2014 (Sheaffer & Brender-Ilan, 2014) Risk Management

To explore how locus of control (LoC), impulsive sensation-seeking (ImpSS), leadership styles and femininity affect perceived crisis preparedness.

19 2014 (Yin & Jing, 2014) Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

To empirically test a schematic framework for assessing crisis threats.

20 2015 (Alvinius, Bostrom, & Larsson, 2015) Leadership and Organization Development Journal

To develop a deeper understanding of how leaders manage their own and others’ emotions in professional crisis management organizations during severely demanding episodes.

Empirical Qualitative Interviews

21 2015 (Case et al.,

2015) Leadership

To highlight the centrality and importance of environmental science’s construction and

mobilization of leadership discourse, and to offer a critical analysis of environmental sciences’ deployment of leadership theory and constructs.

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22 2015 (Combe & Carrington, 2015) Leadership Quarterly

To investigate leaders' sensemaking, the similarities and differences in beliefs and values at an individual level over time under crises.

23 2015 (Gruber, Smerek, Thomas-Hunt, James, 2015) Business Horizons

To investigate the ousting and subsequent return of a chief executive.

Empirical Qualitative Analysis of media reports 24 2015 (Haddon, Loughlin, & McNally, 2015) Leadership and Organization Development Journal

To explore leader behaviour preferences during these difficult economic times.

Empirical Mixed Questionnaires and interviews 25 2015 (Knights & McCabe, 2015) British Journal of Management

To explore how discourses around both leadership and the crisis reflect and reproduce similar taken-for-granted assumptions about

subjectivity and representations of organizational and economic life.

26 2016 (Jong, Duckers, & van der Velden, 2016) Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

To assess and compare how the role of tens of mayors was perceived and evaluated.

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27 2016 (Pelser, Bosch, & Schurink, 2016) South African Journal of Human Resource Management

To explore which organizational elements contribute to or detract from coherence during perceived organizational crisis.

28 2016 (Sommer, Howell, & Hadley, 2016) Group and Organization Management

To examine how the behaviours of team leaders can influence the resilience of team members during a crisis through affective mechanisms

Empirical Quantitative Questionnaires and surveys 29 2017 (Birkeland, Nielsen, Hansen, Knardahl, & Heir, 2017) Leadership Quarterly

To investigate whether the level of and variance in perceptions of fairness, empowerment, and support in leadership behaviours changed as a result of the terrorist attack.

Empirical Quantitative Secondary dataset

30 2017 (Broekema, van Kleef, & Steen, 2017) Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

To explore what factors affect the learning process from crises of a public sector organization. Remarkably, leadership was not found to play a central role.

31 2017 (Liu, Cutcher, & Grant, 2017) Human Relations

To explore the ways in which authenticity was co-constructed by the CEOs and the print media in the lead up to and during the global financial crisis (GFC).

Empirical Qualitative Analysis of media reports 32 2017 (Teo, Lee, & Lim, 2017) Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

To explore how a discursive

leadership orientation can contribute to the process-based, communicative perspective of resilience.

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33 2017 (Uhr, 2017)

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

To explore whether current

leadership ideals can be barriers for efficient collaboration during emergencies and disasters.

34 2018 (Berthod & Mueller-Seitz, 2018) Journal of Management Inquiry

To explore of the sociomateriality of sensemaking and the role of

leadership in an airplane crash.

Empirical Qualitative Analysis of

investigative reports 35 2018 (Elliott & Stead, 2018) Organization Studies

To examine the socio-cultural

assumptions sustaining the gendering of leadership in the popular press to critically analyse how women’s leadership is represented during the GFC of 2008– 2012.

Empirical Qualitative Analysis of media reports 36 2018 (Kulich, Iacoviello, & Lorenzi-Cioldi, 2018) Leadership Quarterly

To investigate how gender with information on gendered personality characteristics of leaders affect decision-makers' leader choices.

37 2018 (McNulty et al., 2018)

Journal of Leadership Studies

To analyse the nature of perceived impact of leader behaviour on outcomes in crisis management systems and explore the extent to which brain science principles are integrated into crisis management training.

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38 2018 (Osiyevsky y & Dewald, 2018) Long Range Planning

To investigate the conditions of emergence of radical (explorative) business model change intentions within organizations in response to major threats.

39 2018 (Politis & Politis, 2018) Leadership and Organization Development Journal

To examine the relationship between servant leadership and agency problems, and to determine whether gender plays a role in this

relationship.

40 2018 (Snoeijers & Poels, 2018) Public Relations Review

To study crisis perception by individuals in a large governmental organisation during various stages of an unfolding crisis.

41 2018 (Stam, van Knippenber g, Wisse, & Pieterse, 2018) Journal of Management

we propose that in times of crisis, leader endorsement is contingent on promotion-oriented communication. More promotion-oriented

communication leads to more leadership endorsement the more followers experience crisis.

Empirical Mixed Archival study, laboratory experiment and scenario experiment 42 2019 (Bhaduri, 2019) European Journal of Training and Development

To explore the relationship of

organizational culture, leadership and crisis management through

exploration of these three constructs with respect to crisis management.

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43 2019 (Buchanan & Hallgren, 2019) Management Learning

To explore leadership behaviours in an extreme context through analysis of a film.

Theoretical Qualitative Analysis of a film

44 2019 (Carrington, Combe, & Mumford, 2019) Leadership Quarterly

To investigate cognitive shifts in both leader and follower teams when developing consensus or agreement in how to resolve a slowly emerging organizational crisis over time.

Empirical Mixed Case study

45 2019 (DeSisto, Cavanagh, & Bartram, 2019) Leadership and Organization Development Journal

To investigate the conditions that enable or prevent collective

leadership amongst key actors in the emergency management network in bushfire investigations, and to examine how chief investigators facilitate the conditions to effectively distribute leadership and the role of social networks within this process.

46 2019 (Hirudayara j & Sparkman, 2019) Industrial and Commercial Training

To offer a leadership development framework that integrates context, competence and a complexity mindset for crisis leadership in tourism industry.

47 2019 (Kamble & Mulla, 2019) Journal of Indian Business Research

To examine the main and the interaction effect of follower’s professional identity and leader’s use of charismatic leadership tactics (CLTs) on follower performance and work engagement during a crisis.

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48 2019 (Kornberger , Leixnering, & Meyer, 2019) Organization Studies

To investigate how leaders of an intersectoral collective of

organizations made decisions in concert with each other and hence sustained the capacity to act as collective.

49 2019 (Lacerda, 2019)

Business Horizons

To analyse the observed

characteristics displayed by the leaders during an economic crisis and identify specific patterns that led to their success.

50 2019 (Langhof & Gueldenber g, 2019) Journal of Management History

To explore the influence of servant leadership (SL) and authoritarian leadership (AL) during crises and extreme situations.

Theoretical Other Historical analysis

51 2019 (Marques-Quinteiro, Vargas, Eifler, & Curral, 2019) European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

This study tests the hypothesis that self-leadership is positively related with employee adaptive performance and job satisfaction in rapid change and unpredictable work

environments.

Empirical Quantitative Quasi-experimental study 52 2019 (Schmidt & Groeneveld, 2019) Public Management Review

To explore what type of leadership public managers engage in during cutbacks.

53 2019 (Stoker, Garretsen, & Soudis, 2019) Leadership Quarterly

To investigate the effect of the financial crisis on directive leadership behaviour.

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54 2019 (Tasic, Amir, Tan, & Khader, 2019) Journal of Risk Research

To comprehensively describe and analyse factors that shape

organizational crisis preparedness and responses and develop learning mechanisms to enhance resilience of organizational systems.

Empirical Mixed Case study

55 2019 (TenBrink, 2019)

Society and Business Review

To examine whether honesty, ethics and leadership are critical during a crisis by analysing the role

acceptance or denial of executive malfeasance has on firm value after a crisis.

Empirical Quantitative Secondary dataset

56 2019 (Williams, Woods, Hertelendy, & Kloepfer, 2019) Journal of Organizational Change Management

The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of leader potential in an extreme context.

57 2019 (You & Ju, 2019)

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

To investigate the importance of public leaders’ "meaning making" through quotations in news coverage of a health crisis.

Empirical Quantitative Analysis of quotations 58 2020 (Cowen & Montgomer y, 2020) Journal of Applied Psychology

To examine whether consumer reactions to a product failure are affected by the gender of the CEO to whom the organization’s post failure communications are attributed.

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59 2020 (Empson,

2020) Leadership

To exam the power dynamics among professional peers as they attempt to act decisively in response to an acute organizational crisis.

60 2020 (Fernandez & Shaw, 2020) Journal of Leadership Studies

To highlight three of the leadership best practices for navigating

unpredictable adaptive challenges such as that posed by the coronavirus pandemic.

61 2020 (Fors Brandebo, 2020) Leadership and Organization Development Journal

To explore the nature of destructive leadership behaviour and what makes an individual appraise a leader as being destructive in a crisis

context.

62 2020 (Gabrielli, Russo, & Ciceri, 2020) Journal of Organizational Change Management

To investigate which are the most effective organizational practices able to promote an adequate culture prevent or manage effectively crisis situations.

Empirical Mixed Online interviews and questionnaires 63 2020 (Koenig, Graf-Vlachy, Bundy, & Little, 2020) Academy of Management Review

To advance understanding of how CEOs’ trait empathy impacts the management of organizational crises.

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64 2020 (Marko, Gilman, Vasulingam , Miliskievic, & Spell, 2020) Journal of Management History

To investigate two famous historical naval accidents which resulted from poor leadership, insufficient planning and decision-making strategies and demonstrate the value and impact of training that minimizes decisions under stress and enable people to make decisions independently in the face of a loss of communications.

Empirical Qualitative Historical analysis

65 2020 (Tomkins,

2020) Leadership

To contribute some thoughts on the emotions of leader/follower relations to both complement and challenge the strategies and commentary offered by political journalists and communications advisers.

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