Crisis Leadership of World Leaders: Anecdotal Evidence from Global Covid-19 Fightback

This paper evaluates the crisis response of top leaders of 21 selected countries and the WHO and UN heads in respect of Covid-19 actions. The 21 countries had accounted for over fourfifth of global Covid-19 cases and nearly three-fifth of deaths as of May 9, 2020. The study uses anecdotal evidences taken from various media sources as well as insights from available crisis management and leadership literature to make intuitive and exploratory observations and draw inferences on leader behaviour based on these leaders’ actions over a 5-month period from January to May 2020. The study throws up several conclusions. First, countries vary in their Covid-19 incidence and fatalities; countries having higher incidence and fatalities were mostly those with weak leader actions on the crisis. Countries taking early and/or stronger actions generally had higher recovery-to-death ratio. Second, on the basis of the leaders’ orientation towards public health & life motive, political constituency or legitimacy motive, and global opinion/image motive, the paper classifies the leaders’ action styles as ‘missionary’, ‘strategist’, ‘politician’, ‘gamer’ and ‘supporter’, with the ‘missionary’ leaders focused just on the public health & life even when some of them had an underlying political mission, and the ‘gamers’ largely interested in their political constituency or legitimacy. Third, in terms of leadership styles, ‘missionary’ leaders mostly followed a positive stewardship, charismatic or transformational style; ‘strategist’ leaders had a mixed transactional, transformational or narcissistic style; politicians mostly followed a heroism style; and ‘gamer’ leaders were characterized by narcissistic, authoritarian or heroism style. Heads of WHO and UN were transactional in style. Fourth, with respect to personal strategy of leaders, ‘nurturing selfimage’ was more popular with ‘heroism’ style of leadership and ‘politician’ action style. The personal strategy of ‘problem solving’ was followed by leaders of different leadership styles, but mostly ‘missionary’ leaders. Leaders who had a ‘repositioning’ angle to their personal strategy achieved better results from their crisis leadership irrespective of their leadership and action styles. Transactional leaders mostly preferred ‘system leveraging’ as their personal strategy, whereas ‘play victim/villainize’ was a personal strategy associated with narcissistic or authoritarian leadership and a ‘gamer’ action style. Finally, when the study is extended to Covid-19 data on infections and deaths of sample countries for a 3-week period beyond May 9, 2020, we find the ‘missionary’ leaders (on action style) as the most successful in terms of slow progress rates (