Crisis Leadership Behaviors: A Redirecting Review

Liana Kreamer et al.

Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies2025https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518251343118review
ABDC A
Weight
0.41

Abstract

Crises are a particularly important context for the study of leadership, yet our understanding of specific leader behaviors during these times is limited. The existing literature often portrays leaders as heroic figures who shepherd and guide people through crises. Our paper challenges the existing view and focuses on four key questions related to crisis leadership that we argue remain unanswered. Through a review of 82 studies in the crisis leader behavior (CLB) domain, we identified seven themes: CLBs are context-specific , CLBs are framed as creating stability rather than enhancement , researchers tend to focus on internally focused CLBs , studies of externally-focused CLBs focus on public perception , there is often a target-beneficiary mismatch in studies of CLBs , the CLB domain risks empirically overclaiming the results of studies , and the CLB domain over-relies on WEIRD samples . We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of these findings and redirect attention to broaden our understanding of crisis leader behaviors through future research endeavors.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518251343118

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@article{liana2025,
  title        = {{Crisis Leadership Behaviors: A Redirecting Review}},
  author       = {Liana Kreamer et al.},
  journal      = {Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518251343118},
}

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Evidence weight

0.41

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.25 × 0.4 = 0.10
M · momentum0.55 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.