Gender, trust and empathy: a systematic review of factors influencing successful political leadership in the COVID-19 crisis

Purpose Political leadership received considerable attention during the COVID-19 crisis. However, there is a gap when it comes to aggregated scientific insights into the role of political leadership during crises. This article fills that research gap and explores which factors were critical in explaining political leadership success during a crisis. Design/methodology/approach We conduct a systematic literature review to reflect the current state of research and allow us to derive new insights from the existing findings. Based on the PRISMA procedure, we identified 4,841 studies in three databases. After analysis of title, abstracts and full papers, we included 105 articles in our analysis. Findings The results of our systematic review demonstrate that political leadership during COVID-19 was rather heterogeneous. However, empathic, proactive and transformational leadership have been shown to have a positive impact on leadership success. Crisis communication also emerged as a key task. Attention must be paid to the leadership context and the personal characteristics of the leader. Originality/value This systematic review focuses solely on the political level of leadership during crisis and demonstrates the critical influence of political leadership behavior on leadership success. Furthermore, the critical findings are integrated into a conceptual model that we developed to integrate different perspectives, with the aim of guiding future research on the topic.