POSITIONING THE STUDY AND DEVELOPING A TENTATIVE PROCESS PERSPECTIVE

The foregoing literature review of each research stream highlights several issues that are important in advancing crisis leadership research. The first stream of research frames organizational crises as exceptional events and contexts and presents the response phase as the most challenging with regard to leadership. The second stream supports the effectiveness of transformational leadership in crisis situations overall but indicates that there are times when transactional leadership may be more effective. Although this may indicate the proper mix of effective leadership styles, it illustrates the emergent and situationally contingent nature of crisis leadership. The third stream of research extends this notion by drawing on the first research stream to address crisis leadership in a more time-sensitive and contextually embedded manner while focusing on ad hoc and temporary structures.

The review further illustrates that the field has evolved from framing crisis leadership broadly, to examining individual crisis leader effectiveness using general leadership theories, and finally to re-contextualizing crisis leadership as a role occurring in specific temporal and structural settings. Building on prior research, and responding to the call of Pearson and Clair (1998) of nearly two decades ago, I propose that moving crisis leadership research forward requires a more processual perspective. Specifically, I regard crisis leadership as a phenomenon that is emergent, involves multiple leader roles and functions, and plays out not only over time but also across levels. The main concepts from each of these streams and perspectives, and key concepts in the tentative process perspective developed in this study, are shown in Figure 3.

Crisis leadership as

Figure 3. Prior Crisis Leadership Research Streams and a Tentative Process Perspective

In developing a tentative process perspective, I use conceptual building blocks from the first stream that include crisis leadership as an exceptional event and context leadership that occurs in distinguishable phases. Given that evidence for the most effective mix of transformational and transactional leadership styles remains inconclusive, I build on the second stream to regard crisis leadership as emergent and situationally contingent. From the third stream, I regard crisis leadership as a role-based function that can change over time in different and evolving structures, depending on situational needs and demands. Thus, although my work builds on all three streams, it primarily contributes to and extends the first and third streams.

My exploration of crisis leadership as processual requires me to narrow my focus and limit the scope of my research. I explore organizational crises as events characterized by high stakes,

ambiguity, and time pressure in contexts characterized by non-professional responders, resource inadequacy, and ill-defined structures. I also focus on leadership in the response phase, in which the exceptional event and context features are the most prominent. In contrast with existing research, I remain open to various sources and forms of leadership, rather than expecting that one leader takes charge. Therefore, I regard leadership as a role that includes actions intended to orchestrate overall efforts. Finally, because crisis leadership is under-researched in the context of ad hoc mobilized CMTs and larger, meso-level structures, I limit my scope of research to these contexts.

To address the overarching research question about how crisis leadership emerges and develops over time, I find it useful to leverage a functional perspective (Mumford et al., 2000; Fleishman et al., 1999). This perspective is more elaborately described in the empirical papers, and is only briefly described here. According to this perspective, leadership is about complex problem solving through collective efforts; effectiveness depends on how successful leaders are in meeting the situational needs and demands of those being led. Leadership becomes a role—a set of interacting leadership functions and actions—rather than a collection of general and fixed leader traits, styles, and positions. According to the systems view of organizations, what constitutes leadership effectiveness varies over time and in different events and contexts (Fleishman et al., 1991; Katz & Kahn, 1978). Therefore, this perspective resonates well with a processual and contextually embedded perspective on crisis leadership.

With regard to more specific research questions, various streams of extant literature are relevant in the two research settings I have chosen to study: leadership in crisis management teams (CMTs) and larger, meso-level structures. In these settings, the relevance of literature varies depending on which challenges appear to be the most important to address. With regard to CMTs, pertinent questions are how leaders enable ad hoc mobilized, cross-functional teams to perform from the outset, despite being faced with challenges such as unfamiliarity with the task and the team, and how such leadership competencies can be learned before a crisis. To address these questions, I draw not only on crisis leadership literature but also on literature related to team leadership (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002; Zaccaro, Rittman & Marks, 2001) and leadership training and development (Day et al., 2014; DeRue, Nahrgang, Hollenbeck & Workman, 2012;

Salas, Tannenbaum, Kraiger & Smith-Jentsch, 2012).

With regard to ad hoc, larger, meso-level structures, questions relate to changing leader roles and leader structures. There is a paradox in how leaders gain control while adapting to developing situational demands and needs. To address this paradox, I draw on two competing theoretical perspectives: heterarchical power (Boin, Kuipers & Overdijk, 2013) and distributed power (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007). I also draw on a more recent hybrid power perspective (Klein et al., 2006; Bigeley & Roberts, 2001). Furthermore, I use recent extensions of a functional leadership perspective, that identifies multiple sources, forms, and levels of leadership (see, e.g., DeChurch et al., 2012; Morgeson et al., 2011) to address how leadership emerges and how functional roles and patterns varies over time and across levels.

Relying on this tentative processual perspective on crisis leadership, I ask the following research questions (RQs) in three empirical papers; RQ 1 is explored in CMTs, and RQ 2 and RQ 3 are explored in larger meso-level structures.

RQ 1: What are the key leadership functions in strategic crisis management teams, and how does training contribute to the development of these before organizational crises?

RQ 2: How do leaders balance strategic control and adaptive response during an organizational crisis?

RQ 3: Who emerges as leaders, what are the critical functions of leadership, and how does leadership develop over time and across levels during an organizational crisis?

To advance research in this field, it is important not only to situate the study in the crisis leadership literature and to indicate the relevance of extant literatures. It is also important to make methodological choices to address the questions in a suitable manner. I discuss these choices next.