Digital intercultural leadership in times of crisis : a case study of leadership at Linde during COVID-19 outbreak

Abstract

This research is conducted to study the methods of leadership employed at Linde at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020. The aim is to determine the employees’ perceptions of their leaders’ efforts and to compare the used approaches to those described in suitable popular theories in different fields. The fields of interest for this paper are leadership in general and under specific conditions, namely in remote digital teams, intercultural teams, and in crisis situations.

To begin with, a literary review is conducted to build familiarity with the various topics and to identify those theories that best fit the chosen parameters. After a careful scrutiny and comparison, one or two theories are chosen for each topic. The main theories that were picked include: John Kotter’s Leadership theory; cultural frameworks by Hofstede, Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, as well as Hall; research on virtual team leadership conducted by Hambley et al.; and crisis leadership theories by Boin and Sellnow & Seger.

The chosen theories are utilised as a framework, from which information is synthesised to form statements for a survey. This survey is divided into different series, each of which address a different aspect of the discussed themes. It is then distributed among Linde’s employees, whose attitudes the survey is intended to measure.

What the survey revealed, was that Linde’s employees were mostly happy with the efforts of their leaders, however, there was a lot of room for improvement still. The biggest issues were with the consistency and availability of information, communicating a vision for people to follow in the crisis situation, and involving people in decision making. Where the leaders excelled was getting the people work together towards common goals, acknowledging different cultural backgrounds, making the employees see the common goals as their own and thus take ownership of the efforts done, and in keeping people calm and motivated to push through.