Name & Roll No: Brig Gagan Deep Singh Baath, PHD PT/02/13/O
CIS Title: A cross-sector examination of leadership styles and key competencies during extreme contexts.CIS Proposal Submitted by Brig. Gagan Deep Singh Baath to Ph.D. Office 07-04-2021
The incursion of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
reached global scale in 2020, requiring a response from leaders worldwide.
Although the virus is a ubiquitous problem, world leaders have varied
appreciably in their responses resulting in substantially different outcomes in
terms of virus mitigation, population health, and economic stability. The social and economic crisis caused by the current
COVID-19 pandemic is an extreme but relevant example of the types of challenges
leaders face today. Effective leaders are considered one of the most pivotal
resources for organizations both in times of normalcy and crisis, yet
international criticism has flared pertaining to national, state, corporate,
military and policy leadership in this COVID-19 environment of discontinuous
change. Leadership behavior ánd changes in leadership behavior are
context-specific (Dinh et al., 2014; Liden & Antonakis, 2009). The
so-called contextual leadership research, a fairly broad area of leadership
research, examines whether situational or contextual factors lessen or enhance
the impact of leadership practices and explores how leadership takes place in
specific contextual settings (e.g., military, educational; Day & Antonakis,
2012; Liden & Antonakis, 2009) Furthermore, context has been important in
leadership research because it can influence the type of leadership that emerges
and is effective (Liden & Antonakis, 2009). Leadership plays a vital role
in organizations by developing and enabling organizational competencies (Murphy
and Johnson, 2016; Pendleton and Furnham, 2016) Although our results demonstrate that the biggest part of the variance
in leadership behavior caused by the event can be explained at the individual
level (see also Van Emmerik et al., 2010), yet we find significant variation
between organizations and even countries, which supports the multi-level
approach of this study. Further, it is also argued
that the coronavirus crisis is a crisis of leadership theory and practice (Dennis
Tourish, 2020). Mainstream leadership theories are
of little help, since an environment of radical uncertainty means that leaders
have less information, expertise and resources, to guide through the extreme
event. We shall consider the implications of the crisis for
business leadership, suggesting that already strained relationships within
organizations are likely to deteriorate still further. Critical leadership
studies have an important contribution to make in challenging self-serving
theories of business that have come to guide much leadership decision-making.
We have an opportunity to do research that really matters, and participate in
vital conversations about how the theory and practice of leadership can
contribute to better outcomes from the coronavirus crisis, and others still to
come. Public leaders are expected to play several roles, including
understanding and adapting to the problem, as well as planning and implementing
solutions to restore normalcy (Jong, 2017; Vogel and Masal, 2015). Researchers
have also noted that as forms of threat become overwhelming, individuals will
look to leaders to centralize authority and take action (Gladstein &
Reilly, 1985; Isenberg, 1981). Flanagan et al. (1952) observed that military
leaders who took prompt and decisive action, providing initiating structure in
threatening situations, were judged as being more effective than those military
leaders who delayed action. Further, officers who used consultative power in
non-crisis situations were seen as more effective by their followers, whereas
in crisis situations the same style was not correlated with effectiveness
(Mulder et al., 1986). Further, research comparing women and men on
transformational leadership (Bass & Riggio, 2006) showed that women scored
higher on charisma and individualized consideration (Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt,
& van Engen, 2003), giving rise to a “female leadership advantage” under contemporary
conditions (Eagly & Carli, 2003, p. 807). The research question guiding this work is: What are the leadership
styles and key competencies required during and post times of an extreme event? The contrast in the perceived styles of the leaders is
proposed to be analyzed using the theory of transformational & authentic
leadership and charismatic, ideological, pragmatic (CIP) leadership
model as a framework.