A Multidisciplinary Approach to Leadership During the COVID 19 Era. The Case of Romania

ABSTRACT

The COVID 19 pandemic hit on a global scale more than 219 countries were affected. Governments are struggling to raise awareness regarding the need to get vaccinated. Efforts have been made relentless since 2019 to prevent the infection globally. How to increase the vaccine acceptance rate proved to be a challenging task for governments since vaccination is the only efficient measure to efficiently protect people from disease. According to various studies, it is necessary to vaccinate about 90% of the population to create herd immunity and decelerate the transmission of the virus. According to the numbers published by the Romanian Health Ministry (January, 2022), 40.9% of the population got vaccinated. In terms of age segments, about 35% of people between 19 and 25 years of age had at least one dose of vaccine while the new variant of COVID (Omicron) spreads and infects about 25.000 each and every day (as of January, 2022. We all need to better understand why some people prefer to vaccinate while others oppose to vaccination. The focus is on raising the vaccination rate and therefore, public health officials and governments work on finding the strategy to impact people so that they decide to vaccinate. While vaccination questions trust in government officials, strategies and policies, recent studies (Hui 2020) show that in times of crisis such as the COVID 19 pandemic is also a matter of leadership and leadership authenticity. Some evidence found in the literature suggests that authentic leadership is increasingly in demand (source). Therefore, we looked into the issue of authentic leaders – what are the traits, skills, and behaviors that people associate with authentic leadership in the specific context of (COVID) crisis leadership. The research methodology is based on the construction of a questionnaire structured on types of questions related to what authentic leadership means in relation with the present pandemic. The second part of the questionnaire looked into the beliefs and behaviors of our respondents toward vaccination. Data were collected and analyzed. The model of authentic leadership that emerged and the formulated hypotheses were tested followed by a statistical analysis, interpretation and conclusions. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.