Learning From Catastrophes and Leadership Thought

INTRODUCTION:In the face of rapidly changing world, the success of achieving short and long-term goals of organizations mostly depends on empowering employees with necessary knowledge and skills and building a team that can cope up during possible business troubles (Tekin & Zerenler, 2008). The figure who will undertake this responsibility is called a leader who is usually the manager of the organization. Leaders are categorized under various names and adjectives depending on their successes or failures in times of crises (Canoz & Ondogan, 2015). It is obvious that managing the catastrophe risk in an organization needs more of leadership skills rather than routine managerial skills. A good leader should be well prepared for a crisis or any kind of catastrophe. A leader may prevent recurrence of a crisis, diminish the effects of an occurring one and shorten the duration of it. The new leader will turn negative effects of a catastrophe into positive ones by evaluating the human factor in business (Klan, 2003). Leadership is sometimes a congenital character feature coming from birth, sometimes a quality of a certain status held in an organization and a sort of natural human behavior. Leadership is a process of interaction between the leader and members of a group (Aydin, 2000) (Erdogan, 2000). Crisis leadership requires qualities like an integration of competences, abilities and manners that enable a leader to design for, respond to, and learn from catastrophic situations (Brockner & James, 2008) (James & Wooten, 2005).There is an increasing understanding in the relationship between the importance of leadership and catastrophe. Leaders with emotional intelligence competencies are effective leaders during hard times. Skills like empathy, self-awareness, persuasion and the ability to manage relationships would be important in catastrophe and risk management (Lockwood & SPHR, 2005). The very first thing a leader should do in time of emergency is to create and sustain the credibility of the organization and reliability among crisis stakeholders such as employees, customers, suppliers, partners, investors, media, governmental bodies and special interest groups. For profit organizations, there are more valuable things than money such as the reputation and brand value of the organization in the marketplace. Therefore, a leader is supposed to manage and protect these values in the time of catastrophes. The new leader manages this with leadership abilities, such as strategic thinking, interaction, empowerment, confidence and integrity (Lockwood & SPHR, 2005). In this sense, communication will emerge as a vital factor. A good leader recognize that media, almost on a daily basis, have the ability to introduce an organization in or out of catastrophe. In cases such as product recalls, corporate fraud, employee discrimination, media and public relations will have extreme importance and communication skills of leaders are critical in managing the situation (Wooten & James, 2008). If the leader is not prepared to manage such events, that will have negative, long-term significances for a firm's effectiveness, status and human resource management methods (Garcia, 2006). For example, it may be the executive manager's duty to send the message of honesty and compassion to interest groups. One of the most popular examples quoted in literature are that of Johnson & Johnson crisis management during the Tylenol crisis in the early 1980s (Lockwood & SPHR, 2005). Crisis leadership does entail adopting a complex set of competencies to lead an organization through three periods of crisis which are before, during and after and into a well-off recovery (Bolman & Deal, 1997) (Burnett, 2002). Moreover, under the helms of an effective leader, the probability of firm getting stronger is high after the crisis. As it was mentioned before, competencies that are necessary in crisis management are vital for the recovery of an organization from a catastrophic situation. …