When Super (Wo)man Fails to Appear: Beyond Idealized Prototypes in Crisis Leadership

Crisis leadership has been a topic of interest for nearly a century. Recent works present an idealized, gendered template for such leadership by casting men as masculine protectors or superheroes and women as feminine nurturers or selfless, relational superwomen. Whereas the deductive evidence for such effects is mixed at best, our work examines if these idealized prototypes reflect the current realities of enacting leadership during a crisis. We studied both male and female leaders, inductively, over an 8-week period during the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrary to a majority of previous leadership studies that suggest prescriptive remedies for alleviating crises, such as charisma, inspiration, or empathy, we change the scholarly conversation in crisis leadership by rejecting idealized leadership templates, which implicitly or explicitly assume leaders have agency. Instead, we found gender similarities in how both women and men enacted leadership in their roles by being distinctly human: replete with doubts about their agency and engaging with emotions, but moving forward nonetheless. Interestingly, gender differences emerged at a granular level in how men and women enacted leadership: men seemed to mirror the leader prototype, whereas women adapted their leadership tactics in response to contextual cues. Taken together, these findings call for redirecting the scholarly conversation in crisis leadership toward a dualism—gender similarities and differences can occur simultaneously in leader roles. Intriguingly, and breaking with past reviews on crisis leadership, there were no super(wo)men in these findings; rather they point at a complex yet parsimonious theoretical explanation for how crisis leadership unfolds. We discuss the implications of this theoretical exploration for future empirical work.