Falling Apart and Coming Together: How Public Perceptions of Leadership Change in Response to Natural Disasters vs. Health Crises

Theoretical Background

In Part 2.1, Leadership for the Greater Good, it is not clear whether the authors treat the concepts of public leadership and leadership for the greater good separately or as complementary concepts. Please describe it more.

Thank you for picking this up. We have now clarified that leadership for the greater good is intended as a complementary concept that is germane to all sectors rather than specific to the public sector.

On lines 188-190 it was written: “However, it is critical not to conflate the outcomes of leadership for the greater good with the practices employed by public leaders and institutions to create these outcomes”. Why it is critical? Can you explain it more?

We have added an explanation based around the well-known means/ends argument. We hope that our meaning now comes across more clearly as to why it is critical to consider outcomes (but not only outcomes), as contributing to the greater good is about process as well as outcomes.

In hypothesis from H1 to H3 used in the beginning of the sentence the phrase: "perceived" (in H1 and H3) or "perceptions of" (in h2). Can you use other phrase in these hypotheses? These phrases don't suit me.

H1-H3 have been amended to more clearly state the expected relationships between potential drivers and of leadership for the greater good. We believe the word ‘perceptions’ to be necessary, as we are measuring public perceptions and want readers to be able to clearly see this.

We are open to other wording options if the reviewer would like to suggest something more suitable.

And also my question, how to understand the greater impact in hypothesis 4?

We changed the wording to “significantly predict” to provide greater clarity in H4.

Part 2.2. Perceptions of Leadership in Times of Crisis is analyzed quite superficially. For example, shouldn't the authors also mention in this section about risk and change management as an important issue of leadership in times of crisis?

In response to comments of both Reviewers 1 and 3, we added a brief overview of crisis leadership research to section 2.2.

While we acknowledge the importance of risk and change management to crisis leadership, we opted not to include these terms in the Introduction section, as these concepts cover what leaders should do to successfully navigate a crisis or change. Our paper takes a different focus: that of perceptions of leaders. We do not have data from the survey which would inform how the public perceives leaders to have acted during crises, only perceptions of leadership for the greater good over time. We thank the reviewer for the suggestion; we believe a mention of these would be more appropriate in the Discussion. We have now included a recommendation for the importance of risk and change management in the Practical Implications (7.1).   

Method

In part 3.1. Scale development Can you describe how the list of leadership factors for the greater good has been refined and finalized? (lines 350-352)

We have expanded section 3.1 to provide more insight into how we developed and refined the list of indicators. Specifically, we have clarified the insights gleaned from the focus groups and our interviews with subject matter experts, as well as the process though which these items were generated and refined as part of the process of identifying indicators that were both easily interpretable by the public and germane to the government, public, private and not-for-profit sectors. Although federal government leadership is the focus of this paper, the Australian Leadership Index was designed, as now noted in section 3.1, to be relevant across sectors.

Discussion

Parts 5.1 and 5.2 require polish in terms of linking the obtained research results with the resulting from the analysis of the literature. This applies in particular to point 5.2.

We have expanded section 5.2 to include a more thoroughgoing discussion of our results, with particular attention to the support obtained for the three blocks of indicators of public beliefs about government leadership for the greater good.

In part 5.3 you wrote about integrative leadership. Where this aspect was considered earlier in the article because it seems to have been omitted.

We have taken the reviewer’s suggestion and removed the mention of integrative leadership in order to more consistently reference the theories of responsible leadership, public value, and public leadership.

Part 5.4 Practical Implications was treated perfunctorily. Can you give some detailed implications?

Thank you for your feedback. We definitely agree that the practical implications should be expanded to give leaders more direction in using these findings.

We have re-written section 5.4 (which is now section 7.1) to provide more detailed practical implications around how to influence public perceptions of leadership for the greater good, development of crisis strategies, tailoring responses to the type of crisis, developing PR strategies to ensure leadership initiatives are accurately broadcast, and tracking perceptions over time (using evidence-based research) to continually improve and overcome challenges.

5.5 Limitation and Future Research and 5.6 Conclusion - I think these parts should be excluded from the discussion and treated as separate points

We used Saleem et al.’s structure (from the current Special Issue) as a guide to restructure the end sections. We now have:

5.0 Discussion

6.0 Limitation and Future Research

7.0 Applications for Leaders and Conclusions

The findings are useful for academics and for senior leaders in the public arena in terms of the behaviours they need to focus upon during crisis. I find that the authors have given very sensible comments regarding the limitations of this study. The article is very well written

Thank you for your supportive comment on the various components of the manuscript. 

The conclusion seems a little short.

In order to address a comment from Reviewer 1, we have restructured the end sections, so that the Conclusion is now separate from the main Discussion but combined with the practical implications, resulting in a longer Applications for Leaders and Conclusions section.

In short, it is a well-written work with a well-defined idea and adequate analysis based on the literature. I found discussion, implications, and limitations sections very informative.

Thank you for your supportive comment on our manuscript. 

A key work that is missing is: Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and practice. Sage publications. Which gives useful insights into the literature on constructs related to Leadership.

Thank you for calling this resource to our attention. The chapter on Leadership Ethics was particularly useful to the framing of our amended Applications for Leaders and Conclusions section.

“Crisis leadership” has been mentioned in the keywords section but you have not talked about it sufficiently. Please consider adding few more sentences about “Crisis leadership” in the literature review section.

We have now added a broader introduction and review to section 2.2, based on the reviewer’s suggestion.

Please explain why you used public leadership and not public management.

We have replaced the term ‘public leadership’ with the term ‘leadership for the public good’ (introduction) and leadership for the greater good (section 2 onwards) to highlight our intended focus on public perceptions of leadership for the good rather than approaches by professional public sector managers and leaders to managing public sector institutions.

For The Scale Development Section:

Provide more information about your interviewees. What do you mean by experts? What was the criteria?

Please also provide more information about focus groups. How many participants in each group, What do you know about these participants, etc.

We have now provided more information about the subject matter expects (the sectors they represent, selection criteria) and the focus groups (age range, income groups represented).

Please check the “References” section as some citations do not follow the format of the journal.

Thank you for alerting us to this formatting error, which likely occurred as a result of pasting into the Sustainability template. Italics and unnecessarily hyphenated words have now been corrected.