Paternalistic leadership as a double-edged sword: Analysis of the Sri Lankan President’s response to the COVID-19 crisis

Abstract

Despite the challenges facing small economies, leadership research has given scant attention to leaders’ behaviour in those countries during crises. Using seemingly paradoxical domains of paternalistic leadership theory: authoritarian, benevolent and moral leader behaviour, together with concepts like populism from the political science domain, we analyse how Sri Lanka’s ‘strongman’ President provided a façade of paternalistic leadership during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through analysis of written and verbal content (public speeches, independent reports and government media output), we show how the power exercised through authoritarian, as opposed to authoritative behaviour, together with espoused morality and benevolence, appears to have been effective in the short term in containing the pandemic. However, sustained success in dealing with the crisis is hampered by the contradictions between this paternalistic façade and the dark realities of authoritarian and populist leadership. Accordingly, we offer theoretical insights into how the darker elements of paternalistic leadership can be better understood and averted.