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The COVID-19 pandemic has, besides the health concerns, caused an unprecedented social and economic crisis that has particularly hit service industries hard. Due to extensive safety measures, many service employees have to work remotely to keep service businesses running. With limited literature on leadership and virtual work in the service context, this paper aims to report on leadership effectiveness regarding employees' work performance in virtual settings brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drawing on the input–process–outcome (IPO) framework, this research investigates the effectiveness of leadership on service employees' work performance mediated by work-related tension, autonomy, and group cohesiveness. Furthermore, this study explores moderating effects of the service provider's digital maturity. To test the derived model, the authors collected survey data from 206 service employees who, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, unexpectedly had to transform to a virtual work environment. The authors analyzed the data using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results indicated that it took task- and relation-oriented leadership behavior to maintain service employees' work performance in a virtual environment during crisis situations. Further, results indicated mediating effects of service employees' individual job autonomy and team cohesiveness; surprisingly, work-related tension did not impact employees' work performance. Results offered service businesses guidance on how to effectively lead in times of crisis when service employees predominantly work in virtual environments.

This is the first empirical study to show how leadership affects service employees' work performance in a virtual work environment during crisis times. Thus, the study contributes to the scarce literature on the impact of leadership in service firms that have to operate in such a setting.

The aim of the paper is to explore leadership behavior as a process of sensing through the connection of various aspects of the self to external dynamics.

The paper is based on an in-depth study of an international technology firm where 36 managers were interviewed. Content analysis was used to interpret the data.

If leaders learn to be more authentic in the way they think, feel, and act, they will be more connected to who they are and what they stand for in the face of uncertainty.

Leaders should embrace adversity as an opportunity to connect more deeply to their inner senses by breaking away from their comfort zones and acting courageously through their decisions.

The paper offers a different understanding of adaptive leadership from the sensing perspective. The firsthand experience of managers challenged by the Covid-19 pandemic offers fresh insights into the study of leadership behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to explore adaptive leadership behavior during a global health crisis in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It discusses the characteristics of adaptive leadership and offers practical steps to help managers lead through tough times.

This paper is based on an in-depth study of a mid-sized multinational professional service firm where 25 frontline managers were interviewed. Individual stories about the challenges and opportunities of how these managers led their company out of ambiguity contribute to critical insights as discussed in this paper.

First, leading adaptively involves a fundamental acknowledgment of your vulnerabilities by turning them into a source of inner strength through the support of others. Second, it is important to harness collective wisdom to accelerate urgent and complex decision-making. Third, experimentation is key to breaking away from status quo and venturing into innovative practices. Fourth, following personal instincts while exercising objective judgment could give you the courage to think and act differently.

This paper offers firsthand insights into the mindsets and behaviors of practicing managers who spontaneously shared their deeper feelings and expectations of their leadership setbacks and foresight of what would be expected of the “new” normal in a post-pandemic era. The perspectives offered here provide a deeper dimension to the current understanding of adaptive leadership.

This paper explores the concept of leadership anatomy in a health crisis like Covid-19 as it relates our body parts to sensory connections that affect our response to uncertainty.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 leaders and a cross-section of 47 employees drawn from all six business units of a multinational professional service firm. Content analysis of the data led to key implications for leadership practice.

Leading through the anatomy results in a productive tension that awakens the inner voice, helping leaders think, feel, and act in more resilient ways.

Using leadership anatomy as an analogy, we suggest that leaders should learn to connect with their inner senses to develop systems thinking. Such is the ability to make sense of our chaotic surroundings in the way we think, feel, and act.

The significance of this study is the rare moments of leadership behavior captured in the midst of a pandemic that contribute to current debate and direction in leadership research and practice.

The literature on charismatic leadership in organizations has neglected the organizational context in which such leadership is embedded. The purpose of this article is to enrich and refine charismatic leadership theory by linking it to its organizational context. We argue that while charismatic leadership principles and processes potentially apply across a wide variety of situations, the emergence and effectiveness of such leadership may be facilitated by some contexts and inhibited by others. We develop and present a series of propositions linking contextual variable to the emergence and effectiveness of charismatic leadership. Among the contextual variable we examine are the organizational environment, life-cycle stage, technology, tasks, goals, structure, and culture, as well as the leader’s level in the organization and the circumstances surrounding his or her appointment.

Toxic leadership is often studied from a leader-centric perspective, which focuses on the detrimental outcomes of leaders with destructive ideas and practices. In this chapter, we provide a global value chain (GVC) perspective, which accounts for effects of corporate leadership from inception of a product or service idea to its consumption across the value chain. In particular, we demonstrate how toxic leadership is sustained through an illusio, i.e., the allure of the often-charismatic leadership discourse, which is rendered unaccountable due to lack of global regulation of GVCs. This allows for global organizations and toxic leaders to exploit weaknesses in national-level regulation. Drawing on a netnographic study of toxic leadership in Amazon, we demonstrate how toxic leadership created the illusion of success while perpetuating toxicity and exploitation across their complex value chains internationally.

The importance of modeling digital leadership in quickly digitizing countries, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is inevitable for building leadership capabilities to lead, engage and motivate remote employees in the digital environment. Using Blake and Mouton Grid, the current study examines the behavioral approach used by the leaders from both public and private sectors while managing their workforce digitally in the period of the pandemic, when 70% of the workforce worked remotely for the first-time in the region.

An online survey was conducted by the managerial employees working in different firms using self-administered questionnaires and adopting the snowball sampling technique. In total, 476 respondents participated in the study from both the Emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

The analysis using IBM SPSS and Smart PLS software reported that 9 out of 10 leaders positioned their digital leadership style well above the middle-of-the-road management style (5,5) oriented towards team management (9,9); with 7 out of 9 displaying high team management leadership style, while managing remote workers. However, millennials displayed higher task orientation when compared to generation-x leaders, who concentrated more on their relations with the workers.

The findings have implications for practitioners in technology driven regions. Also the results highlighting the task-oriented approach of millennials digital leaders have implication for owners and board of directors of the firms that seniority is not the only credible approach for leadership positions.

The study reveals the behavioral styles beneficial for digital leaders to develop their leadership capabilities and increase their effectiveness while managing the workforce digitally. Black Mountain Grid and its two-dimensional leadership matrix has been found to be a useful conceptual approach for understanding digital leadership behaviors, and based on study findings, recommendations have been provided to effectively improve its utilization for leading teams. The findings have implications for practitioners in technology driven regions as well as digital leadership field scholars.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic adversely affected small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in India. Amongst the challenges faced were the adjustments required in leadership skills to address pandemic-induced technological changes and the necessity for employee skill upgrading. This study examined the factors that influenced organisational performance in Indian SMEs, particularly in the context of the digital transformations that were brought about by the pandemic.

The study employed a cross-sectional design to investigate a set of hypotheses that were formulated to understand the relationships amongst digital leadership, digital training, empowerment and organisational performance. The data were collected during the pandemic from 487 employees who were working in various SMEs in India. Questionnaires were distributed through email and social media platforms, and electronic consent was obtained from each participant.

The study's findings indicated positive associations amongst digital leadership, digital training, empowerment and organisational performance. They also highlighted the mediating role of empowerment in these relationships. Furthermore, organisational resilience was found to positively moderate the relationship between empowerment and performance.

The study stands amongst the pioneers in exploring the role of digital leadership and digital training during the pandemic and their impact on employee empowerment amongst SMEs in a developing country.