Self Leadership and Innovative Behaviour Challenges in Academics During COVID-19 Crisis

Self-leadership skills are a construct that has generated considerable research efforts over the past decade (e.g. Manz, 1992; Manz & Neck, 1999; Manz & Sims, 2001), but a new area of research has focused on how academicians uses their leadership skills and innovativeness during COVID-19. In general, self-leadership is an influence-related process through which individuals (and working groups) navigate, motivate and lead themselves towards achieving desired behaviours and outcomes (Manz, 1992). Its roots can be traced back to theories on self-influence, which emphasize concepts of self-navigation, self-control and self-management. This study focuses on the factors influencing self-leadership, innovative behaviour, self-efficacy and job satisfaction of academicians in COVID-19. It also helps to study the motivating factors that influence the academicians and enhance their performance during COVID-19. Besides that, it also helps to identify the difference between self-leadership, innovative behaviour, self-efficacy and job satisfaction during this crisis phase. A set of structured questionnaire was self-designed based on the qualitative research and literature review. The questionnaire consists of 16 questions on 5 points (Likert scale) ranging from (1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree) based on these variables. Then the respondents were asked to rank their beliefs towards attributes. The ranking ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Numerically (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = agree and 5 = strongly agree). There were totally 100 respondents from an institution who all were faculty members of different engineering departments comprising of AEIE, CSE, ME, EE and from management department comprising of MCA, MBA and BBA faculty members. The ANOVA tests were performed for all the six hypotheses to determine the F value and F critical values. The findings of this study lend support to the role of self-leadership skills in fostering innovative behaviour at work due to COVID-19 crisis. In conclusion, it can be stated that academicians and especially the one under this study should focus more on the enhancement of self-leadership strategies specifically constructive thinking strategy so that they can increase their job satisfaction level during this crisis period of COVID-19. But the deadly corona virus badly effects on all the sectors but huge changes happen in the academic sector through e-leaning, and adoption of innovative strategies took place in academics to face this challenging situation of COVID-19.