The Leadership in Tackling the Unforeseen Consequences of the Covid-19 Pandemic: Who Is the Emergent Leader?

Abstract

This study explores the emergent leadership behaviours in the Covid-19 pandemic and finds that emergent leaders among post-millennials value success, knowledge and freedom over conservatism and traditionalism. Turkey, considered a middle-aged country in terms of age distribution, provides an adequate context to examine and explore the post-millennial perceptions of emergent leadership. To examine emergent leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic in higher education in Turkey, we utilised a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design that included collecting, analysing and implementing quantitative and qualitative data to understand the emergent leaders’ personality and behavioural patterns among 19 distinctive groups. Turkey is a country where authoritarian and paternalistic leadership approaches are widely idealised. Counterintuitively, our findings show that Turkey’s leadership emergence gives signs of an inclusive turn. As a generational and cohort issue, the post-millennial generation appears to demand greater flexibility, security, fairness and value diversity and inclusivity as emergent leader behaviours. Our findings align with the literature, showing the significance of inclusion as a value in leadership emergence, even in a nation such as Turkey, which lacks regulations, discourses and interventions that promote equality, diversity and inclusion.