Leadership and Blame

                                       (img: steemit.com)

Motunga an kalabad! In stressful situations, people’s real intentions and motivations will crop up. Performance under stress can show how quick witted or level headed a person is, or on the contrary, it can show where their weaknesses lie.

Human behavior during any crisis may be much different than we might expect. Contrary to popular belief, most people are quite resilient. They seldom respond completely irrationally during crises. We’ve all seen the headlines about people panicking or becoming hysterical during emergencies, but the reality is that individuals experience both productive and unproductive responses to crises (Badzmierowski, 2011).

A far more common reaction is for affected individuals to first attempt to ensure their own safety and welfare. Many will then make every effort to help others. This behavior has been well-documented in high-profile emergencies worldwide.

This is being observed by many of us among people at this time. After ensuring that they are safe with their families, the need to extend to others will surface. That is why we see people donating money, food and even spending time productively by sewing alternative masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE’s).

But why do we hear about blaming and finger pointing in the local, national and international level? Out of fear and anxiety, people tend to shield themselves with defense mechanisms so to be “strong”.

A well-known categorization of defense mechanisms by George Vaillant in 1994 differentiated between immature defense mechanisms, such as projection (blaming others) and denial, and mature defenses, like humor and sublimation (turning your unconscious motives into productive activity). Other models building on Vaillant have similarly attempted to categorize defense mechanisms along a continuum from unhealthy to healthy.

Scapegoating, on the other hand, serves as an opportunity to explain failure or misdeeds, while maintaining one’s positive self-image. If a person who is poor or doesn’t get a job that he or she applies for can blame an unfair system or the people who did get the job that he or she wanted, the person may be using the others as a scapegoat and may end up hating them as a result (Glick, 2002).

These things, if not well-thought through formal education or simply self-reflection will always surface on stressful situations. And since not all people are capable of reaching meta-cognitive levels, we can just accept these outbursts as part of human nature.

Scholars and practitioners increasingly accept the idea that leadership is the ability to influence and facilitate others towards common goals, not merely a function of holding an official position.

Crisis management research has largely ignored one of the most pressing challenges political leaders are confronted with in the wake of a large-scale extreme event: how to cope with what is commonly called the blame game.

Effective crisis leadership entails recognizing emerging threats, initiating efforts to mitigate them and deal with their consequences, and, once an acute crisis period has passed, re-establishing a sense of normalcy. These are no easy tasks in a time of new threats and increasingly vulnerable societies.

To underscore the point that BLAME GAME is not unique in crisis management, this writer reviewed literature on the subject.  Some analysts have explored the causes and drivers of blame games and blame management (Weaver 1986; Ellis 1994; Hood 2002; Hearit 2006; Hood et al. 2009). Others have detailed how crisis-induced political blame games generally unfold (McGraw 1990, 1991; Br¨andstr¨om and Kuipers 2003). Our particular interest is whether the leadership styles of political leaders can help explain the dynamics and outcome of these crisis-induced blame games (Parker and Dekker 2008; Hood et al. 2009).

One salient point was recommended and that is to focus on THE CRISIS and let the people who think that they are “doing something” do their thing. The blames might be a roadblock towards the tasks at hand…

However, they also face pressures to criticize and reform these same arrangements (Boin and ‘t Hart 2003). They must navigate a difficult pathway between an open, reflective, responsibility-accepting stance that encourages policy-oriented learning but may leave them politically vulnerable, and a defensive, responsibility-denying stance that may deflect blame at the price of undermining learning and eroding a leader’s long-term legitimacy.

The complaints and the blaming are CONSTANTS in the equation of crisis management. The challenge now is not them but how to eradicate the difficult variable (which is the virus) in the equation.