Leadership During a Pandemic: A Lexical Analysis

To manage pandemics, like COVID-19, leadership can enable health services to weather the storm. Yet there is limited clarity on how leadership manifested and was discussed in the literature during COVID-19. This can have considerable public health implications given the importance of leadership in the health sector. This article addresses this missed opportunity by examining the literature on leadership during a pandemic. Following a systematic search of nine academic databases in May 2021, 1,747 publications were screened. Following this, a lexical analysis of the results section was conducted, sourced from a corpus of publications across myriad journals. The results found a prevalence of references to “leader” as a sole actor, risking the perpetuation of a view that critical decisions emanate from a singular source. Moreover, “leadership” was a concept disconnected from the fray of frontline workers, patients, and teams. This suggests a strong need for more diverse vocabularies and conceptions that reflect the “messiness” of leadership as it takes shape in relation to the challenges and uncertainties of COVID-19. There is a considerable opportunity to advance scholarship on leadership via further empirical studies that help to clarify different approaches to lead teams and organizations during a pandemic.