Leadership in times of natural crises-a systematic literature review

Abstract

The topic of leadership comes with many elements of situational scenarios, one particular of interest is during times of natural crisis. Natural crisis affects businesses and people worldwide with varying effects. It is notable that leadership styles and other factors can lead a business either to success or failure based on their proactivity. To explore the area of leadership studies in times of natural crises, a systematic literature review was undertaken. The review of studies from past fifteen years revealed that there were a lot of studies on the topic of leadership. Out of those, only 34 articles published from 2005 to 2020 were found relevant to the topic under study. These were presented in the form of a systematic literature review of “Leadership in Times of Natural Crises”. The systematic literature review was done using PRISMA framework which is the most widely known method of conducting review. The main link between these articles, although each focusing on different areas of research, was the relationship between leadership styles and impact on organizational management during natural crises. The review of the 34 articles from Scopus database explored different leadership styles and theories with their impact on organizations. The resources grew substantially in relation to COVID-19 in 2020, which also highlights the importance of this topic as there were limited resources available in the last twenty years when exploring papers that studied the impact of leadership impact during SARS outbreak in 2003. The finding of this article highlights the gap in research on leadership studies, and particularly in relation to pandemics, or for a broader term, natural crises.