Taking the Helm in Dire Straits: Leadership in Times of Crisis

Large-scale crises such as pandemics, economic shocks, and institutional collapse pose substantial threats to society, and thereby increase the need for effective leadership. Recent research within organizations found that leaders become more directive during a crisis. Characterized by supervising followers closely and making a relatively large number of decisions, the directive leadership style can be viewed as an attempt to regain lost control. As crises are expected to occur more frequently in the future, with this dissertation I aim to provide more insight into this ‘directive reflex’.

To this end, the dissertation presents three empirical chapters that each address a different aspect of this reflex. Chapter 2 assesses the 2016 Brexit referendum outcome, and demonstrates that unexpected crises can cause long-lasting increases in directive leadership, especially among managers at lower hierarchical levels. With data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chapter 3 shows that increases in directive leadership during a crisis may benefit followers’ performance and creativity in the short run, but may increasingly harm them when directive behavior becomes more structural over time. Chapter 4 demonstrates the importance of economic factors such as interest alignment for how shocks impact delegating behavior.

Taken together, the dissertation makes a scientific contribution by addressing three key deficiencies in current leadership research: insufficient attention to context, inability to draw causal conclusions, and imprecise definitions of leadership concepts. Moreover, it provides greater understanding of the impact of crises for the wide range of parties in practice concerned with leadership, such as HR practitioners and policy-makers.