Leadership During Crisis: An Examination of Supervisory Leadership Behavior and Gender During COVID-19

Abstract

Due to major work disruptions caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, supervisors in organizations are facing leadership challenges as they attempt to manage “work from home” arrangements, the health and safety of essential workers, and workforce reductions. Accordingly, the present research seeks to understand what types of leadership employees think is most important for supervisors to exhibit when managing these crisis-related contexts and, in light of assertions that women may be better leaders during times of crisis, examines gender differences in how male and female supervisors act and how subordinates perceive and evaluate them in real (Study 1) and hypothetical (Study 2) settings. Results indicate that communal leader behaviors were more important to employees in all three crisis contexts. In Study 1, communality was a stronger predictor than agency of supervisor likability and competence. In Study 2, communality was also more positively related to likability, but agency and communality were equally predictive of competence ratings. Ratings of real supervisors suggest that women were not more communal than men when managing these crises, nor did perceptions of leader behavior differ by supervisor gender in a controlled experiment. However, evaluations of women's competence were more directly related to their display of communal behaviors than were evaluations of male supervisors. This research is helpful practically in understanding effective supervisory leadership during the COVID-19 crisis and contributes to the literature on gender and leadership in crisis contexts by attempting to disentangle gender differences in leader behaviors, perceptions, and evaluations.