Adapt or Die

Leadership Resilience during Crisis

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to uncover and illustrate how leaders are managing the COVID-19 crisis and practice resilience in their daily leadership practices. The hospitality industry is the context of the study. This study has used a qualitative, longitudinal research approach. In total 35 interviews with 10 managers in five hotel organizations have been conducted during 2020-2022. Furthermore, 70 hours of workplace observations have been conducted. . The study illustrates that the leadership practices was related to three themes: responding to the crisis, (ii) persistent adaption and (iii) learning during and from crisis. The result shed light on that the leadership practices were a balancing act of moving between emotional and rational decisions. The study also illustrated how the managers learning processes emerged from these practices of resilience as the managers continually were exposed to situations they had not experienced before and needed to manage in order for their firms to survive.