PRESENTATION OF EMPIRICAL PAPERS

The study undertaken in this doctoral dissertation consists of three empirical papers. An overview of the papers including topic, type of research, nature of research question, research design and data collection, data analysis, and contribution is provided in Table 3. A summary of each paper follows next.

Table 3. Overview of Empirical Research Papers

Paper 1:

“On the Fly” Leadership in Strategic Crisis Management Teams:

A Quasi-Experimental Study of Performance Before and After Training

The purpose of this study was to examine key leadership functions in ad hoc mobilized strategic crisis management teams (S-CMTs). Members of these teams, charged with resolving ill-defined, high-stakes tasks in ill-defined structures under pressure, typically have little familiarity with the task and the team. Despite the importance of identifying specific leadership competencies in these teams and how such competencies can be developed before crises, prior research has tended to focus on the effectiveness of general leadership styles in crisis situations.

Therefore, I leveraged a functional leadership perspective, crisis leadership literature, and team leadership training and development literature to identify key leadership functions that can be trained before a crisis occurs. I used the internal referencing strategy (IRS), a novel quasi-experimental research design in which non-equivalent dependent variables are used as a proxy control group, to train 29 top managers and teams from a multinational corporation taking part in the study. I exposed the leaders to their teams before and after training in the two key leadership functions, ‘leader strategizing’ and ‘leader relating.’ I measured training transfer using scenario-based crisis simulations. Findings show that crisis leadership can be developed through training. Furthermore, leaders who exhibited more functional S-CMT leadership influenced the two affective states of trust in leaders and psychological safety, as well as the performance outcomes of high-quality/high-speed performance and satisfaction. The study contributes to a more specific and temporally sensitive perspective on crisis leadership in S-CMTs. It also provides guidance on how to train and develop crisis leaders to influence important emergent states and performance outcomes.

Paper 2:

Gaining Control by Letting Go:

Heterarchical Leadership and Dynamic Power Transitions During an Organizational Crisis

The purpose of this study was to explore leadership across time and levels in an ad hoc, mobilized, meso-level crisis management structure during an organizational crisis. The study was based on the unique opportunity to collect real-time data at the headquarters of a multinational energy corporation while a terrorist attack and siege of a production plant in a corporate subsidiary was ongoing. The rich data include interviews, observations, and documents such as logs, reports, and preparedness plans that were analyzed using a combination of well-known qualitative approaches such as grounded theory and process analytic strategies.

Contrary to dominant perspectives of how leaders gain control—perspectives that emphasize hierarchical structures and formal leadership—the findings show that leadership roles and structures change depending on situational needs and demands, but not in an entirely emergent and distributed manner. At the core of this type of crisis leadership practice, which I label as

‘heterarchical crisis leadership,’ are dynamic power transitions driven by the competency and legitimacy of different leaders and structures, and enabled by three contextual factors:

procedural training, preparedness plans, and norms, values, and culture. Although it has more in common with hybrid crisis leadership perspectives, this practice is more emergent and informal than prior research has shown. Heterarchical crisis leadership is valuable in balancing the tension between strategic control and adaptive response. The study contributes to a more processual understanding of power dynamics over time between different roles and structures and at multiple levels during organizational crises.

Paper 3:

Collective Leadership during an Organizational Crisis:

The Centrality of Role Transgressions in Aligning Efforts

The purpose of this study was to explore how collective crisis leadership emerges and evolves in temporary crisis management structures during an organizational crisis. It used rich data collected at the corporate headquarters of a multinational corporation while a terrorist attack and siege of a foreign-subsidiary production plant was ongoing. The data analysis of interviews, observations, and written documentation used well-known grounded theory and process analytic strategies. The findings contradict much prior literature, in which crisis leadership is often depicted as formal, planned, and individual; they reveal that though multiple sources of leadership are involved in crisis management, including both formal and informal leaders, the emergence of informal leaders provides much-needed leadership capacity. Furthermore, leaders carry out four critical leadership functions in different domains: strategizing, structuring, developing, and relating. This allows for more specialized efforts, at the risk of misalignment of overall efforts. This risk appears to be overcome by leaders who act as ‘role transgressors,’

stepping out of their roles to achieve alignment. Using rich data from a situation that researchers rarely have access to, the study contributes to understanding the collective nature of crisis leadership. It identifies multiple leadership sources and a typology of leadership functions, and shows how leaders who transgress their roles to align efforts cause leadership to become collective over time and across levels.