Crisis Leadership Theory Development: Identifying Gaps and Direction through Theory-Building Method
Keywords:
Crisis leadership, Theory development, LeadershipAbstract
Under this turbulent era, crisis leadership are needed for leading and handling situations in organizations, systems, and societies. This position article pointed the lack of Crisis Leadership Theory, the current situation, issues, and gaps of crisis leadership theory development. Even there are various crisis leadership concepts now, this is still not sufficient for social sciences’ scholars and professionals to get deep understanding of this phenomenon if this practical concept is not in a form of a formal theory. Exising crisis leadership concepts were proposed to be key managerial practices for ones who are managers or positional leaders in dealing with crises but they did not provide rationales and mechanisms of individuals who become and perform crisis leadership. Therefore, the authors reviewed and explained the meanings and compoenents of a theory and what should be a structure of theory regarding leadership. Then, this article presents the discussion on missing parts of crisis leadership phenomenon which are the part of crisis: what are impacts and effects on individauls from crisis? how do they deal with those effects? and the part of leadership: how come individuals decide to step out to take a lead? what styles they have in leading others in crisis? Finally, the gaps to be fulfilled in further theory development were presented and guided, through each step in the framework of Dubin’s theory-building as it is appropriate example that illustrate the first part in Theory Development (conceptualizing/ modelling) and the second in Research Operation (operationalizing/ hypothesizing/ testing).
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