Do We Need a New Leadership Paradigm Due to Covid-19?

Abstract

Explores whether the changing context of COVID-19 requires new leadership skills in organizations and, perhaps even, a new context-specific leadership theory. Fourteen professional blogs and reports related to leadership skills and practices in response to COVID-19, published in the professional online literature during the height of the pandemic (March 16 - December 20, 2020) were reviewed in terms of suggested new leadership style dimensions and contrasted with the tenets of existing academic leadership theories. The proponents of an emerging leadership style advocate that in dealing with the pandemic, leaders must be able to manage their organizations in turbulent times, lead a distributed workforce of individuals and teams, and become a resilient leader themselves. Synthesis: The analysis suggests the leadership dimensions called for during the pandemic were already present in transformational leadership theories (e.g., authentic, shared feminine, servant and crisis leadership theories) but that the pandemic provided the structural break accelerating the existing transformational leadership paradigm. COVID-19 also confirmed leadership matters and the command-and-control leadership style—still prevalent in many of our top-down bureaucratic organizations—is outdated.