Redefining Leadership Roles in Managing Crises in Organisations: A Systematic Literature Review

Crises strike when least expected. Most organisations have collapsed as a result of crises situations. Essential resources including lives have been lost in the wake of crises. Leadership have essential roles to play in ensuring that the effect of crises were minimized in organisations. Leadership make strategic decisions, shape organization culture and facilitate resource allocation for execution of activities essential for the survival of the organisation. Although crises were unpredictable, and vary in nature magnitude and impact, it was important to put in place a general and comprehensive plan to mitigate the severity of the aftermath.

This paper systematically reviewed articles on crisis management and leadership roles from JSTOR and Elsevier open databases. The articles were not limited to time period, to allow for a comprehensive search. The study used a systematic literature review. A total of 815 Journal articles were initially identified, 633 of which were dropped as they were out of context, while 182 articles were selected. A further 140 articles were found inappropriate, leaving 42 articles for final review. The study attempted to identify and integrate leadership roles essential in crises management, from different articles thereby providing a more elaborate source that could guide leadership and database for various stakeholders. The results of this study showed that majority of the articles, 40.47%, consisted of an average of four out of the eight essential roles identified. None of the articles comprehensively addressed most of the essential roles of leadership in managing crises.

The study identified eight essential roles which included spearheading the entire process of crisis management, guiding on: collaborative effort, setting up a contingency plan, research and keeping stock of past experiences. Others were implementing training and retraining on crises related subjects, putting in place a communication strategy, establishing a crisis kit, and resource allocation. The paper concluded that there were gaps in articles reviewed, there was no single article reviewed which contained all eight essential roles therein. Information on essential roles of leadership for crises management was not comprehensively covered in any of the single articles, but scattered across different articles. This article has therefore attempted to place all the eight identified essential roles for managing crises, in one article which would be helpful to leaders. The study results may be helpful to further research on leadership perspective of managing crises in organisations.