Strategic Leadership Competencies: Evidence from the State of Qatar

Abstract

Leading in the age of more chaotic environments with newly emerging challenges and crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, demands special strategic leadership (SL) competencies. The main purpose of this study is to identify a specific SL set of competencies that should be available to strategic leaders and verify their availability to top-level public sector managers in the State of Qatar. An empirical analysis of 120 respondents revealed strategic leadership competency gaps among Qatari top-level managers. Further, top-level managers were not fully engaged in determining their organizations' strategic direction, did not exercise all SL behaviors, and only partially demonstrated strategic leadership characteristics, as they were more engaged in the operational activities of leadership. The study revealed that there are no statistically significant differences among respondents toward strategic leadership behaviors and characteristics attributed to their personal and occupational variables. The findings of this study will significantly contribute to enhancing and building strategic leadership competencies for top-level managers in the public sector organizations. A list of strategic leadership competencies that this research identified can serve as a frame of reference for designing strategic leadership training and development programs to enhance strategic leaders' capacities to manage their organizations more effectively.

Emergent in Strategic Management, Theories, and Strategic Leadership: Implications of Absorptive, Adaptive, and Managerial Manifold Wisdom

“…Strategic management study is the fastest-growing field and constitutes divergent perceptions based on scholars' thoughts, feelings, and discipline, as observed by John Godfrey Saxe (19th-century US poet), who storied about 12 blind men who surrounded and touched different parts of an elephant based on their specific positions around the elephant; thereafter, they gave descriptions of the elephant depending on their sense perceptions (Mintzberg, 1990;Bell & Rochford, 2016;López et al, 2019;Bindra et al, 2019;Fernández et al, 2019). According to Mintzberg (1998), the research on strategic management points in the same direction by providing efficacious strategy design and implementation to gain a new organizational competitive advantage and sustainable performance (Mintzberg et al, 2020). In assertion, the emergent of strategic management advancement and achievement have superseded other fields within management (McKieruan, 2017).…”

Strategic leader attributes for clinical leaders in an HIV healthcare system: Perspectives of healthcare providers in AMPATH clinic, at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret,Kenya

“…A strategic leadership healthcare systems study in Sub-Saharan African countries established that healthcare systems require clinical leaders with strategic leader competencies to provide vision & inspiration for the organization (4), foster high quality & safety of healthcare (5,6), set realistic goals to meet client needs (7), prepare clinicians to be leaders in both daily clinical and academic practices in a collaborative manner (8) however, these are not known in the HIV care where leaders are confronted with complex situations (9). A recent strategic leadership study a rmed that leading in the age of more chaotic environments and newly emerging challenges and cases such as the Covid-19 pandemic demands special strategic leadership (10) but the speci c strategic leadership attributes were not highlighted. In Uganda, the strategic leadership of clinical leaders, team functionality, patient age, patient sex, and health facility type were signi cantly associated with HIV viral load suppression (11), but this is not known in the Kenyan context.…”