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Leadership, authority and crisis: Reflections and future directions

2015; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 11; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1742715015596641

1742-7169

Dermot O’Reilly, Claire Leitch, Richard Harrison, Eleni Lamprou,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

As we noted in the introduction to this Special Issue, discussion of the relationship between leadership and crisis is not new. For some, the emphasis is on crisis, or the sense-making that takes place in crisis situations (Weick, 1988), on asking what leadership is produced in times of crisis (Mabey and Morrell, 2011), and on asking what leadership is appropriate for times of crisis (Chambers et al., 2010). For others, leadership itself is the focus, revisiting notions of leadership which are problematised by the occurrence of crises (Grint, 2005; Probert and Turnbull James, 2011), reconsidering the relationship between crisis and forms of charisma (Bligh et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2009) or viewing crises as windows of ‘dangerous opportunity’ (Musselwhite and Jones, 2004) for incumbent or aspiring leaders (Ulmer et al., 2014). ‘Crisis’ itself is no longer considered to be an occurrence or a one-off event but instead can be viewed as endemic and constitutive. For instance, for Virilio (2012), the 21st century world has been transformed by three events or bombs: first, the atomic bomb, which introduced a new degree of militarisation and fear of its consequences; second, the ecological bomb represented in global warming and environmental changes (rising sea levels, ablating