Crisis Leadership of Covid-19 Fightback: Exploratory Anecdotal Evidence on Selected World Leaders

Abstract

This article evaluates the Covid-19 crisis response of top leaders of 20 selected countries from January to May 2020 using anecdotal evidence from media sources and insights from the available crisis management and leadership literature. The main objective of the article is to examine whether the Covid-19 crisis experience and outcome of sample countries are related to their leaders’ behaviour and actions. Based on leaders’ orientation towards certain action motives and action and leadership styles, the article classifies the leaders’ action and leadership styles. The article finds that the leaders with a ‘missionary’ action style displayed positive leadership styles and generally had the best Covid-19 outcomes, while those with a ‘gamer’ action style were associated with negative leadership styles and poorer outcomes, with those with ‘political’ and ‘strategist’ action styles falling in between. To validate the impact of evolving leader behaviour on Covid-19 outcomes, the article evaluates the average daily growth of Covid-19 cases in the subsequent (post-analysis) seven weeks and tests the mean differences between different style groups. The tests indicate a significant difference in the outcomes between different style groups except between ‘gamers’ and ‘strategists’. The difference is more pronounced when the BRI[.]S countries (i.e., BRICS minus China) in various combinations are excluded from the test. A similar conclusion arises for the negatively and positively oriented leadership styles. Thus, while finding a relationship of leadership behaviour with Covid-19 outcomes, the article also provides a reason to suspect the role of socio-economic and institutional factors in clouding or confounding the leadership effect in view of the distinctive behaviour of OECD and the large emerging countries.