Leadership Behaviour in Covid-19 Crisis Response: A Personal Strategy Proposition

Abstract

This paper analyses the personal strategy driving COVID-19 crisis behaviours of 20 country leaders. It explains the concept of personal strategy and establishes its theoretical basis. It also reviews leaders’ COVID-19 action contexts, actions and associated dynamics to infer the personal strategy driving their behaviour. The article finds the best personal strategy for COVID-19 crisis management as ‘crisis resolution’ and its variants adopted by leaders with a track record in crisis management or facing serious political compulsions—the latter, with a ‘career turnaround’ motive, were focused on erasing unfavourable political image. Leaders following personal strategies of self or negative orientations were the least successful or most unpopular. The article categorizes personal strategies broadly as crisis-focused, negative-focused, ideology-focused and mixed-focused, and it shows that personal goals and personal strategies of country leaders could be interpreted with existing theories. Drawing from a previous study on the same 20 leaders, the article shows that personal strategy of ‘crisis-focus’ is associated with positive styles of crisis action and leader behaviour, ‘negative-focus’ is related to negative action and behavioural styles, and ‘mixed-focus’ is linked to ‘strategic’ actions and transactional behaviour. Except for ideology-focus, leaders’ choice of personal strategy is not found exclusively related to the developmental or geopolitical status of their countries, which proves that personal strategy is a leader phenomenon. Differences in personal strategy among leaders led to different results in different countries—positive orientation resulted in positive outcomes and negative focus caused negative outcomes. The article concludes that personal strategy as a medium of transmitting leader traits into leader behaviour through support of personal goal can fill the gap in the current literature in connecting personal traits to leader behaviour.