Traversing the storm: An interdisciplinary review of crisis leadership
Introduction
“Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm” (Publilius Syrus, 85–43 BC)
When faced with a crisis, those impacted look to their leaders for direction, reassurance, and hope (James & Wooten, 2010). Crises are urgent, ambiguous, and high stakes events, that have the potential to exhaust resources and destroy the reputation of individuals and organizations (James, Wooten, & Dushek, 2011). For leaders, responding to a crisis is complicated because any type of crisis forces leaders to deal with challenges that are very different from everyday business problems. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that has wreaked havoc on organizations worldwide and is to date responsible for over four and a half million deaths (International Monetary Fund, 2021, World Health Organization, 2021), is an event that most leaders were not prepared to handle (Al Saidi et al., 2020, Crayne and Medeiros, 2021). While crises were once considered to be relatively rare (Pearson & Clair, 1998), they are predicted to increase in frequency due to climate change, population growth, and rising geographic density (World Economic Forum, 2020). As such, leaders will face the daunting prospect of dealing with more frequent, more intense, and more damaging crises than ever before. Given these dire forecasts, a review of crisis leadership is both important and timely for three reasons.
First, despite the critical role of leadership during a crisis, some leaders may lack the confidence or ability to respond effectively (Malinen, Hatton, Naswall, & Kuntz, 2019). Crisis leadership is complicated by the fact that leadership actions desired by stakeholders will vary according to the different types of crises being faced. For example, North et al. (2013) found that leaders felt ill-equipped to deal with the magnitude of employees’ emotional responses following the 9/11 terrorist attack. More recently, a poll of leadership perceptions during COVID-19 found that only 39 % of employees in the US strongly agreed that their organization had communicated a clear action plan, while less than half strongly agreed that their leader kept them informed of the organizational impact of the pandemic (Harter, 2020). Given these concerns, a review of the empirical crisis leadership literature can provide both scholars and practitioners with evidence-based insights into effectively leading organizations during different types of crises.
Second, given the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is growing scholarly interest in understanding the critical role of leadership during crises (see Fig. 1). There have been recent editorials in relation to crisis leadership (e.g., Forster et al., 2020, Rubin and Hamel, 2020, Spalding et al., 2020); special issues and calls for papers (e.g., Jacquart et al., 2020, Kim et al., 2020, Mau and Ohemeng, 2020, Newman et al., 2020, Tourish, 2020); and empirical and conceptual pieces published (e.g., Dasborough and Scandura, 2021, Hu et al., 2020, Rudolph et al., 2021). In addition, The Leadership Quarterly published a recent bibliometric review of crisis leadership that mapped out linkages in the extant crisis leadership literature (Bavik, Shao, Newman, & Schwarz, 2021).
Despite Bavik et al. (2021) bibliometric analysis, which brought together various fragmented streams of crisis leadership literature, our understanding of how leaders respond to specific types of crises remains underdeveloped. “Type of crisis” refers to the particular crisis situation being faced (Coombs & Holladay, 1996); for example, crises include a wide range of damaging events such as floods, bushfires, wars, terrorism, product failures, ethical scandals, global pandemics, and global financial crises. We aim to build on Bavik et al. (2021) recent contribution by exploring how different types of crises may require different responses by leaders, answering Bavik et al. (2021) call to study leadership across crisis contexts. Crises of different kinds have unique properties and pose various challenges to organizational leaders (James et al., 2011). Therefore, examining leadership within and across different crisis types is important (Bavik et al., 2021). Despite the existence of various crisis typologies, few crisis leadership studies utilize them (e.g., Bavik et al., 2021). To address this, we draw on an existing crisis typology (Coombs & Holladay, 1996) to explore leadership in response to various types of crises. By identifying common themes that emerge from the crisis leadership literature, we hope to provide valuable recommendations for future research and leadership practice in response to different types of crises.
Finally, there has been little assessment of the empirical crisis leadership literature in terms of its quality or methodological rigor. The Leadership Quarterly’s mission is to publish studies of high methodological quality, and critically assessing the crisis leadership literature allows us to identify areas for methodological improvement. Assessing the quality of crisis leadership research is important because empirical research that lacks methodological rigor hinders the ability of management scholars to provide meaningful advice with real world policy implications (Antonakis, 2017). While the review by Bavik et al. (2021) lists the empirical designs used and suggests that natural experiments should be employed to study crisis leadership, their review offers little in terms of critiquing the methodologies utilized in prior studies of crisis leadership. Here, we contribute to the crisis leadership literature by identifying methodological flaws in existing empirical studies of crisis leadership and provide recommendations for future qualitative and quantitative research following established guidelines (Aguinis and Solarino, 2019, Antonakis, 2017, Antonakis et al., 2010, Hill et al., 2021).
Before we address these aims, we begin our review by clarifying definitional issues that have hindered crisis leadership research. It is important to clearly define what an organizational crisis is (and is not), and to define crisis leadership. We also provide our rationale for using the Coombs and Holladay (1996) crisis typology to classify crisis leadership research. Once these foundational conceptual arguments are made, we then explain the systematic search method employed to identify the studies included in this review.
Section snippets
Definitions: Organizational crisis and crisis leadership
Pearson and Clair (1998) define an organizational crisis as “a low-probability, high-impact event that threatens the viability of the organization and is characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution, as well as by a belief that decisions must be made swiftly” (p. 60). Drawing on this definition, and following earlier work by Hermann, 1963, James et al., 2011 argue that organizational crises are distinct from “run-of-the-mill business challenges”3
Article Search, Inclusion, and coding
We undertook a comprehensive and systematic search of the literature to identify qualitative and quantitative studies to include in our review of crisis leadership. To conduct our search, we followed best practices in the field (e.g., Parmigiani and King, 2019, Short, 2009, Siddaway et al., 2019; see Fig. 2). Using Pearson and Clair's (1998) seminal crisis article as the starting point, our search covers the period between 1998 and July 2021. We searched the PsycInfo and Web of Science
The empirical crisis leadership literature – Study characteristics
Leaders at various levels were featured in the studies of crisis leadership included in this review. The most common types of leaders examined were executive level organizational leaders (k = 35, 50.72 %) and political leaders (k = 19, 27.53 %). Other studies examined frontline or middle-level managers (k = 7, 10.14 %) (e.g., Post et al., 2019, Sommer et al., 2016, Zhuravsky, 2015). The rest of the articles investigated general leadership, either not giving specific details about the types of
Themes emerging from the review
Using an inductive process, we were able to identify the themes that emerged from the empirical crisis leadership literature by consolidating the common and salient findings within each quadrant of the Coombs and Holladay (1996) crisis typology. Specifically, we followed the recommended iterative process to arrive at the core themes for each quadrant, as follows: (1) gaining familiarity with the data by deeply reading all included studies; (2) generating initial codes and organizing them into
Internal crises
(3) Leaders as spokesperson: Apologizing after internal–unintentional crises. The second largest quadrant in our review was internal–unintentional crises (k = 15, 21.1 %), with most articles focused on product defects and failures (k = 11, 73.3 %). Product harm crises pose significant threats to organizational reputation and survival, typically resulting in plummeting sales and punitive action by regulators. Such crises are problematic for organizational leaders, as people often attribute
Similarities and differences across crisis types
From our analysis of the articles in our review, we identified themes that were unique to each type of crisis. In the case of external–unintentional crises, effective crisis leaders used their power and charisma to shepherd their people to safety throughout all stages of the crisis. For crises that are external and intentional, the saint-like leader supported and empowered their followers. When the crisis is internal, but unintentional, the successful crisis leader was an honest spokesperson
Directions for future research on crisis leadership
In this review, we utilized the crisis typology proposed by Coombs and Holladay (1996) to examine leadership within and across different crisis types. This approach allows us to provide evidence-based guidelines for future researchers to answer the call by Bavik et al. (2021) to study leadership across different crisis contexts. The findings from our thematic analysis suggest that leaders appear to respond differently to various crises in order to meet the needs of various stakeholders. Next,
Crisis leadership Antecedents and leadership across levels
A relatively narrow range of individual differences, mostly related to ethical leadership (Brown & Treviño, 2006), were found in the studies examined in this review. For example, narcissism and risk-taking (e.g., Buyl et al., 2019, Kashmiri et al., 2017, Patel and Cooper, 2014), greed (Sajko, Boone, & Buyl, 2021), optimism (e.g., Patelli & Pedrini, 2014), honesty (Gorn, Jiang, & Johar, 2008), and integrity (e.g., Grover and Hasel, 2015, Hannah and Zatzick, 2008). Hence, a promising area for
Practical implications for crisis leaders
The four themes that emerged from our review of the crisis leadership literature provide unique insights into the way leaders responded to various types of crises. Although this review was descriptive, rather than prescriptive, our findings suggest that certain leader responses are seen to be effective by various stakeholders during different crisis types. While the guidance we offer here may be relevant for all crisis types, each type of crisis also has unique properties and challenges (James
A methodological critique of the crisis leadership literature
While the first aim of our review was to examine how different crises require different leader responses, the second aim was to critique the different methodologies that have been used in the literature. As such, guided by methodological best practice (e.g., Aguinis and Solarino, 2019, Antonakis, 2017, Hill et al., 2021), we also undertook a critical assessment of the quality and rigor of all qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies included in this review. Even though most articles
Conclusion
Our systematic interdisciplinary review of the crisis leadership literature contributes to our understanding of leadership during crises in at least three important ways. First, by utilizing the Coombs and Holladay (1996) crisis typology, we bring much needed clarity to understanding the way that leaders respond to different crisis types, and the outcomes of these responses on internal and external stakeholders. In this sense, our review identifies important leadership themes emerging from the
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- 1
The first and second authors contributed equally in writing the manuscript and therefore are co-first authors.
- 2
The fourth, fifth and sixth authors also contributed equally.