Forging a Roadmap for Post-Pandemic Global Leadership: A Preliminary Empirical Study of Citizen Perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social, economic, and political crisis has unleashed an avalanche of uncertainty and unique challenges on the global stage. Within a constructivist theoretical lens, failures of pandemic global leadership are explored. These failures include that global leadership has been xenophobic, siloed, and fraught with mixed messages that make followership problematic. Nevertheless, triumphs of global leadership have also emerged against the backdrop of the coronavirus, such as accelerated digital transformation and the recognition of a cadre of influential young women leaders internationally. Lessons can be gleaned from the coronavirus experience for application in the post-pandemic era. Global leaders will need to be more agile, connected, and empathetic. A preliminary empirical research study concludes that core leadership factors of focusing on collective over individual interests, communicating optimism and a sense of purpose, and having concern for the moral and ethical impact of decisions will be more important post-pandemic than in the pre-pandemic era. Overall, the roadmap for post-pandemic leadership as designed by the citizen voice is grounded in notions of transformational leadership.