Public leadership in and with crisis: an interdisciplinary review

Purpose The ubiquity of crises, along with the crucial role of public leaders therein, has recently accelerated scholarly interest in public crisis leadership. This article provides an interdisciplinary overview of various research streams in public administration and political science and identifies opportunities for future research engagement. Design/methodology/approach Starting from 6,110 peer-reviewed articles, we combine bibliographic coupling and network analysis to create a spatial representation of scholarship. Findings We detect nine clusters of scholarship, comprising 375 articles. These clusters subsume into four meta-perspectives—Reaction-of-Leaders, Evaluation-by-Followers, Opinion-of-Followers, and Exploitation-by-Leaders—that differ in terms of the research object (i.e. leader or follower) and the relationship between crisis and leadership (i.e. leadership in crisis or leadership with crisis). Practical implications Political and administrative leaders should work closely together in a crisis in order to develop well-founded, evidence-based, and practicable measures. Leaders must understand the significant impact their leadership behavior has and should regularly assess how they learn from crises and refine their practices. Originality/value The review is the first in the field to integrate scholarship from public administration and political science. The findings help scholars and practitioners in navigating the complex landscape of public crisis leadership research, proposing four avenues for future research: the role of administrative leaders in crisis management networks, organizations, and teams; interactional leadership before and during crises; leadership in learning and reforming in the aftermath of crises; and cross-national studies examining systems with varying capacities for crisis leadership.