Abstract
Leading in the age of more chaotic environments with newly emerging challenges and crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, demands special strategic leadership (SL) competencies. The main purpose of this study is to identify a specific SL set of competencies that should be available to strategic leaders and verify their availability to top-level public sector managers in the State of Qatar. An empirical analysis of 120 respondents revealed strategic leadership competency gaps among Qatari top-level managers. Further, top-level managers were not fully engaged in determining their organizations’ strategic direction, did not exercise all SL behaviors, and only partially demonstrated strategic leadership characteristics, as they were more engaged in the operational activities of leadership. The study revealed that there are no statistically significant differences among respondents toward strategic leadership behaviors and characteristics attributed to their personal and occupational variables. The findings of this study will significantly contribute to enhancing and building strategic leadership competencies for top-level managers in the public sector organizations. A list of strategic leadership competencies that this research identified can serve as a frame of reference for designing strategic leadership training and development programs to enhance strategic leaders’ capacities to manage their organizations more effectively.
Highlights
To achieve strategic goals, top-level executives of public sector organizations must possess and master certain competencies
The main purpose of this study is to identify a specific strategic leadership (SL) set of competencies that should be available to strategic leaders and verify their availability to top-level public sector managers in the State of Qatar
Leading in environments characterized by being chaotic with frequent crisis and surprises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, with the newly emerging challenges of transworld migrations of capital and labor, cyber employment, and virtual workplaces, demands special strategic leadership (SL) competencies
Summary
Top-level executives of public sector organizations must possess and master certain competencies Each “competency” has received a reasonable amount of attention in the leadership literature, but not in an all-inclusive list covering all competency areas, and seldom in the special context of high-stakes and deep-uncertainty environments that can make or break organizations (Schoemaker, Krupp, & Howland, 2013). This may be because of the “difficulty to imagine an all-inclusive list of competencies” (Guillot, 2003: 74). Aligning these competencies to the strategic type of leadership has received very little scholarly attention
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