The pandemic impacted everything and spread disruption all over the world. Everything from small stores to big business warehouses were affected and struggled for survival. People associated with Indian public sector units have also witnessed and faced the challenges caused by the crisis. Though PSUs are comparatively more secure in terms of jobs, during covid-19 these companies were confronted with several issues. This chapter is an endeavor to understand the challenges faced by PSU leaders and their efforts to mitigate the problems associated with the crisis. It also highlights the leadership styles adopted by the leaders to handle the situation and followed post-crisis. This study signifies the inevitability of empathy, setting an example, and changing orientation in leadership practices during covid-19 situation. The study also mentions that leaders also started practicing these styles post-pandemic.
TopIntroduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has altered people's lives at home, work or social gatherings. It has compelled people to step out of their comfort zone and manage to continue with their daily functioning in a virus-infected world that allows for little control over one's own life. With the office's closing, employees faced numerous challenges, adding to the concerns arising from the anxiety and uncertainty related to the future. These include the blurring line between managing and micromanaging, difficulty in communication and information exchange, work-life balance Etc. At the same time, managers also found it challenging to stay in contact with employees in the virtual setup and faced difficulty in organising creative work online; they reported that “Work had to be reorganised after the lockdown, projects got delayed, collaboration became difficult, and the direct and informal contact with employees was lost” (Kirchner et al., 2021). As the employees return to the workplace after what seems like a blip year or two, they are met with a new set of challenges not limited to missing the comfort of working from home and flexibility.
On the bright side, the COVID pandemic has been a driving force in expanding the role of an organisation as a social enterprise rather than just a business enterprise. The social enterprise notion builds on a new social contract that encompasses a human-centred approach, thus offering a sustainable path to organisational leaders for their workforce (Leadership in the Times of COVID-19, 2020). However, this requires further scrutiny as the organisation is moving towards adopting a new work mode and employees are returning to the physical workspaces. Throughout this transition, the role of leadership holds a crucial place and, with that, has its challenges that need to be addressed. Organisations have indeed invested significantly in training employees for traditional managerial roles. However, more than these efforts might be required to handle the decision-making capabilities of industry leaders who are perplexed in the face of such an unprecedented crisis (Schumacher, 2021). Since leadership in this new labour reality will decide an organisation’s growth and survival, leaders must transform themselves to achieve organisational goals (Contreras et al., 2020; Eichenauer et al., 2021). Only a handful of studies (Chully et al., 2022; Hartwell & Devinney, 2021; Neelakantan et al., 2022; Shukla et al., 2022; Vyas, 2022) have delved into the challenges and concerns of the managers and leaders in a post COVID era which is carrying the imprints of the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity resulting from the pandemic. However, the organisational crisis has been an area of discussion for decades, yet the phenomenon of public sector leadership has yet to receive the required attention from scholars. Hence, some regions which are of utmost importance in the context of public sector leadership and yet not received the needed attention, like a detailed inquiry on public sector leadership attributes related to the proactive measures taken by the leaders (from anticipating the crisis to making preventive plans and making the organisation change ready).
The emergence of leadership in the public sector after covid-19 at the institutional level, the time of crisis, also represents an opportunity for goal-driven and strategic leaders to reshape the organisational principles to build sustainable competitive advantage. Thus, challenges faced by the leaders during the crisis and the modifications of leadership post-COVID require further scrutiny, and this concern is addressed in this chapter. India is a large country and, being the fifth largest economy, has enormous implications and impact on today's globalised world. However, the nuances of Indian management are scarce, especially when it comes to Indian PSUs (Pereira & Malik, 2021) and thus, this chapter aims to fill that gap. The chapter will start with a detailed background of India's public sector units and leadership styles. The following section will explore the covid-19 crisis and its impact on PSUs following a study on leaders of Indian PSUs.