Strategic Leadership Competencies: Evidence from the State of Qatar

Abstract

Leading in the age of more chaotic environments with newly emerging challenges and crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, demands special strategic leadership (SL) competencies. The main purpose of this study is to identify a specific SL set of competencies that should be available to strategic leaders and verify their availability to top-level public sector managers in the State of Qatar. An empirical analysis of 120 respondents revealed strategic leadership competency gaps among Qatari top-level managers. Further, top-level managers were not fully engaged in determining their organizations’ strategic direction, did not exercise all SL behaviors, and only partially demonstrated strategic leadership characteristics, as they were more engaged in the operational activities of leadership. The study revealed that there are no statistically significant differences among respondents toward strategic leadership behaviors and characteristics attributed to their personal and occupational variables. The findings of this study will significantly contribute to enhancing and building strategic leadership competencies for top-level managers in the public sector organizations. A list of strategic leadership competencies that this research identified can serve as a frame of reference for designing strategic leadership training and development programs to enhance strategic leaders’ capacities to manage their organizations more effectively.