Crisis management and leadership: An approach to covid-19 crisis management by the EU institutions»

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought significant changes to the way organizations and businesses around the world are run and managed. Due to the pandemic, several private and public sector organizations have been forced to change the way they operate and implement significant changes in the way they manage their human resources. The way leadership is exercised plays an important role in managing these changes. The purpose of the thesis was to investigate the correlation between leadership style and organizational changes in EU institutions during the Covid-19 health crisis. In order to investigate the relationship between leadership style and organizational changes, a quantitative research was carried out using an electronic questionnaire that was distributed to employees in EU institutions through the Google Forms platform. In total, 49 (53.1% men and 46.9% women) workers in EU institutions with an average age of 35.1 years participated in the survey. The findings of the diplomatic work showed that to a greater extent leaders in EU institutions used transformational and transactional leadership strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the findings of the thesis showed that employees in the EU institutions have a fairly high level of work performance and high level of organizational commitment and well-being during the COVID-19 health crisis. In addition, the employees in EU institutions seemed to be relatively ready to face the changes while they recognized that in the EU institutions there was an effective plan for the crisis management. An important finding of the thesis is that transformational leadership is the one associated with better crisis management, with better employee well-being and with higher levels of performance and organizational commitment. Based on the findings of the thesis, it is necessary to carry out more studies on the impact that leadership can have on the effective management of a crisis in private and public sector organizations.