Communication as Leadership in Public Health Mega-Crises
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that crisis leadership extends well beyond decision-making. Leaders had to communicate uncertainty, coordinate across diverse institutions, counter misinformation, sustain public trust, and continually adapt to rapidly evolving circumstances. Despite this complexity, limited research has examined how leaders navigated these layered, shifting responsibilities over an extended crisis. Crucially, a new study in Frontiers in Communication indicates that role-switching was not the core vulnerability. Instead, challenges arose when leaders assumed new responsibilities without adequate communicative expertise, skills, or resources. Thus, communication cannot be viewed as a specialist function in major crises—it must be embedded at every level of leadership and governance.
Based on 62 interviews with political, public health, and communication leaders across the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the study explores leadership practices, role-switching, and the governance conditions that shaped crisis response.
The findings show that effective crisis leadership depended less on a single leadership style and more on the ability to draw on a repertoire of communicative, collaborative, and adaptive practices. Leaders frequently moved between political, administrative, and communicative responsibilities—often taking on roles far beyond their formal positions. This flexibility helped organizations respond to rapidly changing demands, but also created role ambiguity, coordination challenges, resource pressures, and increased workloads.
The study conceptualizes this as adaptive communicative leadership: the interaction between leadership repertoire, dynamic role-switching, and the governance conditions that enable or constrain effective crisis response. The central takeaway is simple: during prolonged mega-crises, communication is not merely a leadership tool—it is fundamental to how leadership is enacted.
Read more: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1868921/full
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