Better safe than sorry: leadership sensemaking in the time of COVID-19

Abstract

Government leaders who want to promote a collective response to disrupting events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, need to foster a shared understanding of the crisis through effective communication. However, the tone and content of communication varies across and within countries and led to conflicting results in terms of collective sensemaking. To understand how government leaders’ messages shape emotional and cognitive responses of citizens, we designed a 2x2 vignette experiment in which we manipulate the framing (pessimistic vs. optimistic) and content of the message (specific vs. general) delivered by a political leader. Results from 436 participants showed that while the tone of leader’s messages has significant implications for the levels of anxiety and evaluation of the government’s truthfulness and its overall response to the crisis, the content of the leader’s message matters less. Furthermore, these effects were particularly experienced by women and left-leaning participants. Overall, our results highlight the importance of the leader’s communication strategies on influencing the public’s emotional reactions, as well as the perceptions of government effectiveness in dealing with the crisis.

The Unmasked Electorate: Co-Partisanship, Personal Experience, and Perceptions of COVID-19 Risk in Mexico

“…Clements (2020), meanwhile, shows that Democrat-leaning Americans are more likely to follow science-based recommendations for preventative behaviors than their Republican counterparts. Studies outside the US complement these conclusions (Aruguete and Calvo, 2020;Dryhurst et al, 2020;Pickup et al, 2020;Sobral et al, 2020;Calvo and Ventura, 2021;Aruguete et al, 2021).…”

“…Green et al (2020) show that US Republican leaders sent very different messages as regards COVID-19 than Democratic leaders while Gollwitzer et al (2020) find that consuming the Republican-leaning Fox News media decreases adherence to preventive measures. Outside the US, scholars have analyzed how variation in framing and messaging by political leaders shapes attitudes toward the pandemic in Brazil (Sobral et al, 2020;Calvo and Ventura, 2021), Mexico (Aruguete et al, 2021), and Argentina (Aruguete and Calvo, 2020). We do not test for elite messaging in our study.…”

“…Public opinion research suggests that citizen perceptions of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic are influenced by partisan affiliation. Partisanship shapes an individual's perception of their risk of falling victim to COVID-19, their assessment of the overall gravity of the pandemic, and attitudes toward mitigation measures (Aruguete and Calvo, 2020;Dryhurst et al, 2020;Clements, 2020;Pickup et al, 2020;Sobral et al, 2020;Batista Pereira and Nunes, 2021;Calvo and Ventura, 2021;Clinton et al, 2021;Gadarian et al, 2021;Arugete et al, 2021). The preponderance of research on how partisan affiliation shapes COVID-19 risk perception was carried out in the global North, primarily in the United States (US).…”

The Burnout Epidemic During the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Role of LMX in Alleviating Physicians’ Burnout

“…The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the critical role that leaders play in dealing with unexpected and threatening events (Bundy, Pfarrer, Short, & Coombs, 2017;. Research has already shown that leaders are particularly effective in shaping the meaning of the events and the understanding of evolving crises (Sobral, Carvalho, Lagowska, Furtado, & Grobman, 2020). The present study adds to this literature by examining the role of LMX on alleviating physicians' burnout through its influence on perceived psychosocial job demands and resources, in the extreme context of COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Governmental responses to COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Crises management scholarship already highlights the key role of political leadership (Boin & t'Hart, 2003;Boin, t'Hart, McConnell & Preston, 2010;Kapucu, 2006) and our previous special issue also presented evidence about leadership sense-making in time of COVID-19 (see Sobral, Carvalho, Łagowska, Furtado & Grobman, 2020).…”