Managing through a crisis: emotional leadership strategies of high-growth entrepreneurs during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This study explores how high-growth entrepreneurs use well-being and emotional labour as tools to respond to crises. Drawing on 173 longitudinal interviews with 57 high-growth entrepreneurs during the Covid-19 crisis, we explore internal crisis response strategies. The data show that entrepreneurs employ a variety of emotional labour practices which produce organizational resilience. However, these practices are in tension with the strategic practices required for economic resilience. We show how the emotional of entrepreneurs serves as part of their crisis leadership strategy. This adds a new perspective to the literature on entrepreneurial crisis and resilience by showing the complexity of internal reactions to sudden and prolonged shocks.

Rights

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2022.2143905

Repository URI

https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/82977/