Good Leadership Practices in Contexts of Unpredictability

Introduction

The World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The disease broke out in China in December 2019 and three months later, by March of the following year, it had already spread to 114 countries (World Health Organisation, 2020). This disease had led to one of the most unpredictable public heath crises of recent times (Fernandez and Shaw, 2020). The pandemic knows no limitation in terms of time or space. Our health and our freedom are dependent not only on the actions of every one of us as individuals, but also on the actions of others (Forester and McKibbon, 2020). The pandemic affects public health at a global level and has widespread effects on all aspects of personal life (Nicola et al., 2020a). It is expected that not only will there be consequences in terms of physical health, but also on the mental health of those affected, with an increased number of cases of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, domestic violence and child abuse (Galea et al. 2020). The social and economic life of individuals and organisations are changing substantially (Sutkowski, 2020), with this pandemic evincing repercussions in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors (Nicola et al., 2020b), clearly meaning that the pandemic crisis has impacts at the group, organisational and societal level.

In this context, the consequences of good or bad leadership are now, more than ever, of vital importance (Wilson, 2020). Leadership is currently essential not only for the success, but also for the actual survival of organisations. In a scenario of ongoing change with unforeseeable outcomes, the importance of good leadership is intensified (Woszczyna et al., 2015). The development of better leadership for organisations and for society has become a crucial issue.

The literature reveals that the phenomenon of leadership has been a subject of interest for many decades now in academic circles, with various paradigms and approaches having emerged over the years.

Among the most recent theoretical approaches to leadership, responsible leadership and shared leadership are of particular interest.

The core thesis of responsible leadership lies in the idea that the power and influence of leaders should be used “to improve everybody´s lives, rather than contributing to the destruction of the value of individual careers, organisations, economies and societies” (Marques et al., 2018, p.3). Responsible leadership has been approached from two perspectives. From one angle associated to an ethical phenomenon and, from another viewpoint considering the consequences of the actions of leaders. The first perspective considers that responsible leadership is understood as “the social-relational and ethical phenomenon, which occurs in a social process of interaction” (Maak and Pless, 2006a, p. 99). The second perspective argues that responsible leadership could be defined as “the consideration of the consequences of one’s actions for all stakeholders, as well as exertion of influence by enabling the involvement of the affect stakeholders and by engaging in an active stakeholder dialogue” (Voegtlin et al., 2012, p.59).

Another equally recent approach to leadership in the literature is that of shared leadership. According to Welman (2017), shared leadership involves a change in the way that it is conceptualised as this approach views it as phenomenon that is socially constructed among the members of a team. However, the literature offers various definitions of shared leadership. Despite this diversity, Zhu et al., (2018) argue that there are three key elements in the different definitions of shared leadership: lateral influence between peers; the emergence of a group phenomenon; and the dispersal of leadership roles and influence among the different team members.

This chapter aims to demonstrate how in moments of crisis, such as that experienced since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced organisations to make a tremendous effort to reconfigure their functions, very often shifting to remote operations, the answers offered by traditional leadership paradigms might not be the most appropriate for organisations, and how, to the contrary, models of responsible leadership and shared leadership provide more effective tools.