Crisis Leadership in a Hotel Industry during COVID-19 Pandemic in Thailand

Abstract

As previous literatures and research demonstrated the importance of crisis leadership, the major purpose of this article was to identify the significance of crisis leadership during COVID-19 Pandemic. Numerous key characteristics of crisis leadership were proposed in many sources. During COVID-19 pandemic, the plea for crisis leadership is unavoidable in all business arenas. Nonetheless, as hotel industry has been severely affected by COVID-19, this article needed to explore whether or not crisis leadership played a vital role on mitigating the crisis. Three listed hotel companies in Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) were selected as the cases for analysis. Results demonstrated that only one company among these three hotel companies could earn positive net profit income during the pandemic while the other two companies ended up with negative net income. Despite CEOs of these hotel companies implemented key qualities of crisis leadership, the results were not the equivalent in terms of financial performance depending on several hidden forces that were excluded in this analysis, which outlined the limitations of this study. Hence, the repetitive study and analysis with additional approaches and information were recommended.