Cognitive Diversity as the Quality of Leadership in Crisis: Team Performance in Health Service during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The level of leadership skills of healthcare team leaders has long been the subject of interest and many discussions. Several studies have pointed to their inadequacy, which is becoming a serious problem during the global crisis due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There is a direct link between the leadership in the healthcare system and its performance, conditioned by the level of decisions of leaders of medical teams. It is they who determine the performance of healthcare delivery. The study published in this article contains the results from the examination of the dependence between crisis leadership and team performance in healthcare providers. The subject of the research is the impact of cognitive diversity and the quality of crisis-leadership decision-making on the performance of medical teams in the acute crisis phase. The study was conducted on a research sample of 216 healthcare providers after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia (April 2020). The respondents to the research sample involved team leaders in healthcare providers, who have been involved in managing the crisis. The study has justified the positive association between crisis leadership and team performance, which is mediated by cognitive diversity, supporting the quality of decision-making in crisis leadership. The results of the research have proven that the performance of the medical team in the acute crisis phase can be positively influenced through qualified decision-making in crisis leadership amplified by the usage of cognitive diversity.