This research asks: 'were there any objectively identifiable signals in the words leaders used in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic that can be associated with ineffective management of the crisis?' We chose to focus on the leaders of the two English-speaking nations that fared worst and best in the pandemic, the United States and New Zealand. By way of background and in order to contextualise the research, we compared and contrasted Trump's and Ardern's leaderships using the toxic triangle framework of destructive leadership. We then focused on the leader behaviour element of the triangle by using computerised text analysis (CTA) to analyse Trump's and Ardern's public pronouncements during the critical early stages of the pandemic. Based on a similarity index (), we identified linguistic markers associated with destructive leader behaviours and negative outcomes (Trump) and non-destructive leader behaviours and positive outcomes (Ardern). We discuss future applications of these linguistic markers for the diagnosis both of incumbent and potential leaders' responses to crises management.

Our study examines the empirical case of the political leadership response to Covid-19 in England. It shows that, rather than the ideal configuration of leadership suggested by theory, within which individualistic and collective leadership blend, a less balanced configuration emerged that can be characterised as incoherent. In England, an individual political leader behaved in an authoritarian way, which ignored evidence about how to address Covid-19. So, rather than an individual orchestrating a collective leadership effort to address complex issues, leadership was rendered fragmented and chaotic. We suggest that the English context, characterised by populist tendencies and neoliberal economic policy, shaped the poor leadership response to Covid-19.

Despite the challenges facing small economies, leadership research has given scant attention to leaders' behaviour in those countries during crises. Using seemingly paradoxical domains of paternalistic leadership theory: authoritarian, benevolent and moral leader behaviour, together with concepts like populism from the political science domain, we analyse how Sri Lanka's 'strongman' President provided a façade of paternalistic leadership during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through analysis of written and verbal content (public speeches, independent reports and government media output), we show how the power exercised through authoritarian, as opposed to authoritative behaviour, together with espoused morality and benevolence, appears to have been effective in the short term in containing the pandemic. However, sustained success in dealing with the crisis is hampered by the contradictions between this paternalistic façade and the dark realities of authoritarian and populist leadership. Accordingly, we offer theoretical insights into how the darker elements of paternalistic leadership can be better understood and averted.

Focusing on current efforts to persuade the public to comply with COVID-19 best practices, this essay examines what role appeals to religious reasons should (or should not) play in leaders' attempts to secure followers' acceptance of group policies in contexts of religious and moral pluralism. While appeals to followers' religious commitments can be helpful in promoting desirable public health outcomes, they also raise moral concerns when made in the contexts of secular institutions with religiously diverse participants. In these contexts, leaders who appeal to religious reasons as bases of justification for imposing COVID policies may seem to fail to show respect for the autonomy of those who lack the relevant religious commitments, and-especially when a leader herself rejects the religious commitments she makes reference to to persuade others-her appeals to religious reasons may seem to constitute ethically problematic exercises of manipulation. This essay draws on the resources of contemporary political philosophy to analyze and respond to these concerns and concludes that they are not sufficiently well-founded. To the contrary, it contends that there are good moral grounds for leaders to appeal to religious reasons as (partial) bases of justification for why followers should accept COVID policies. In the course of the argument, this essay also highlights how contemporary political theory can enrich discussions about the distinctions between coercion, manipulation, and leadership. It thereby give insight not only into the ethics of leadership but also-at least by the lights of central theories of leadership like that of James MacGregor Burns (1978)-into whether and how appeals to religious reasons can figure into genuine exercises of leadership, in contrast with mere instances of the wielding of social power.

Characterising COVID-19 pandemic as a 'state of exception', we might expect great hero models of leadership to come to the fore. Instead, drawing on a thematic analysis of 246 news articles, this paper illustrates something different: communities, companies, individuals picked-up the leadership mantle but were reluctant to frame their practices under a leadership rhetoric. The paper explores spontaneous initiatives and leaderly actions that were made visible during the pandemic and proposes practice-based implications for redrawing leadership conceptualisations. These practices, coined as unleading, are characterised under four dimensions: unconditionality and social intention; purposeful action in the absence of an achievement motivation; sensing and attending to local conditions; and confident connecting and collaborating. The analysis and discussion of the four dimensions affirm that while leading and unleading are always present when organising, they are more or less visible and practiced depending on organisational, social and individual circumstances. The paper concludes by surfacing questions and reflections for the future of unleading and implications for leadership theorising and practice.

In some democratic contexts, there is a strong aversion to the directive, individualistic and masculine expressions of leadership that have come to dominate the study of political leadership. Such leadership is antithetical to consensus democracies in parts of continental Europe, where the antipathy to leadership has linguistic, institutional as well as cultural dimensions. Political-administrative and socio-cultural contexts in these countries provide little room for heroic expressions of leadership. Consequently, alternative forms of leadership and associated vocabularies have developed that carry profound practical relevance but that have remained underexplored. Based on an in-depth mixed-methods study, this article presents the Dutch mayoralty as an insightful and exemplary case of what can be called 'bridging-and-bonding leadership'; it provides a clear illustration of how understandings of democratic leadership can deviate from the dominant paradigm and of how leading in a consensus context brings about unique practical challenges for office holders. The analysis shows that the important leadership task of democratic guardianship that is performed by Dutch mayors is in danger of being overlooked by scholars of political leadership, as are consensus-oriented leadership roles in other parts of the world. For that reason, a recalibration of the leadership concept is needed, developing an increased theoretical sensitivity towards the non-decisive and process-oriented aspects of the leadership phenomenon. This article specifies how the future study of leadership, as a part of the change that is advocated, can benefit from adopting additional languages of leadership.