Crisis Management: Informing a New Leadership Research Agenda

As the business community becomes more complex, crisis events are likely to increase in both prevalence and severity. Whether management scholarship has kept pace with this new reality is debatable. Moreover, much of the existing crisis research—perhaps understandably—stems from a negative frame: crises are threats or problems to be overcome. Such research has produced relevant insight into crisis handling, has helped categorize the plethora of crisis events, and has connected crisis events to relevant management strategies. We argue here that this framing fundamentally limits the types of questions asked and the methodological approaches used to answer those questions. Perhaps worse, given the important role that leadership plays in crisis handling, this negative frame can hinder the possibilities for the practice and study of leadership. In this article, we review an array of crisis research and explore two theoretical domains—issue framing and deviance—and their potential role for influencing leadership theory. We discuss the challenges of conducting crisis research, and offer suggestions for new methodological approaches and new research questions that are consistent with a more positive leadership approach.