Leadership in Chaotic Change
Open Access DepositedIn 2020, the world was struck with the most significant pandemic in 100 years. During this time, organizations struggled to achieve their organizational goals in the context of uncontrollable internal and external upheaval, known as chaotic change. The COVID-19 pandemic showed that leaders and their organizations were unprepared for the upheaval they would face during chaotic change. Leadership theory, research, and practice have long been situated in the context of stable organizations and rational external environments. Theories of leadership including Servant Leadership and Narcissistic Leadership were developed within the context of this stability. Servant Leadership has been a popular topic of leadership development, and narcissism in leadership has often been showcased as an example of bad leadership. However, they were not tested in the context of chaotic change, and through the perception of leaders in these context. The purpose of this study was to explore leader perception of leadership characteristics during times of chaotic change, like COVID-19. To explore this, I asked “What are leaders’ perceptions of effective leadership characteristics in times of chaotic change?” This study was grounded in the constructs of Narcissistic Leadership, Servant Leadership, and used Q-Sort methodology. Participants were asked to sort 44 servant and Narcissistic Leadership characteristics from most effective to least, within the context of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results were analyzed and a three-factor solution emerged. This study showed that not only do leaders perceive both Servant and Narcissistic Leadership characteristics to be effective during times of chaotic change, but also that there are different styles of leadership that can be effective in the context of chaotic change events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Implications for future research include the need for more nuanced models of leadership that use a variety of leadership characteristics, the examination of these models in a variety of contexts, as well as the use of new investigative techniques, like Q-Sort methodology, to explore the experiences and perception of actual leaders in organizations. While this study was implemented in the context of COVID-19, the context of chaotic change events remains highly relevant to organizations today and into the future.
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