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Staying at home or going out? Leadership response to the COVID‐19 crisis in Greece and Sweden
Author(s) -
Petridou Evangelia,
Zahariadis Nikolaos
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of contingencies and crisis management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.007
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5973
pISSN - 0966-0879
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5973.12344
Subject(s) - bureaucracy , autonomy , politics , crisis response , salient , stern , covid-19 , political science , crisis management , pandemic , public relations , public administration , engineering , law , medicine , disease , pathology , marine engineering , infectious disease (medical specialty)
In this article, we investigate the leadership response to the COVID‐19 pandemic crisis in Greece and Sweden based on the strategic leadership framework put forth by Boin, 't Hart, Stern and Sundelius. We seek to understand the contextual (institutional, administrative and political) factors explaining the differences in stringency of measures and centralization of response in Greece and Sweden, respectively. What trade‐offs did public leaders implement between effectiveness and efficiency to successfully manage the crisis? We find that reliance on expertise plays out differently in centralized and decentralized structure, while a salient lesson drawn for practitioners is that there is more than one path to successful crisis leadership response contingent on institutional capacity, bureaucratic autonomy and political system. The article concludes with implications for leadership response during crises and practical lessons for crisis managers.