The Effect of Crises on Leadership

Abstract

Crises can be regarded as the nursery of leadership in a way. They have both created new leaders and have also proved to be a testing ground for the existing leaders, as well as a filter where the inefficient have been eliminated. Man-made crises have been classified as social, economical, and political crises up to recent times. With the development of modern markets, new financial tools have emerged. Those financial tools have the function of regulating the modern economy, but also they have the handicap of propagating their own crises from the economic field to social and political areas. In this context, crises give way to radical changes in the management paradigm. In such an environment, the leadership virtues of the previous paradigm period turn out to be insufficient. Institutions used to survive during the crisis periods by employing their crisis management plans. However, crises gain a permanent nature during the modern times and tactical crisis management becomes insufficient in the new environment. The phenomenon of permanent crisis forces leadership to have some special virtues. Therefore, it becomes necessary to define a new type of leadership, namely "strategic crisis leadership." The aim of this chapter is to examine the impact of crises on leadership virtues and express reflections on the new type of leadership in the new paradigmal period.