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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.
You are truly a genius sir.
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