This book explores how spirituality can improve an organization's ability to respond to a crisis. It presents biblical examples of leading during a crisis to show how faith can be relied upon to lead during crisis situations. Further, it presents examples of leaders using their faith during trying times. In recent years, organizations have begun to prepare for crises, but scholarly research has not kept up with their efforts. Exploring topics such as communication, servant leadership, and resilience, this work stakes new ground in leadership theory and will foster future research into the role of spirituality during organizational crisis. Steve Firestone is Associate Professor in the School of Business and Leadership and is the Director of the Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership Program at Regent University, USA. His research interests include crisis leadership, the multigenerational workforce, spirituality in the workplace, and innovation leadership.

Autorentext
Steve Firestone is Associate Professor in the School of Business and Leadership and is the Director of the Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership Program at Regent University, USA. His research interests include crisis leadership, the multigenerational workforce, spirituality in the workplace, and innovation leadership.

Inhalt
1.       Introduction  

            Humans have experienced crises since the beginning of time.  History tells us that since the earliest crisis, mankind has attempted to deal with these incidents, survive, learn from them, and be better for having survived them.  Leadership theory dates to the mid-19th century and the industrial revolution.  While leadership theory has developed extensively since it was first founded, crisis leadership theory has not developed on pace with general leadership theory.  Additionally, most books on leading during a crisis neglect to discuss how leaders can use spirituality and faith to help their organizations through these difficult situations.  This book is designed to provide the reader with an in-depth discussion of how they can better lead during a crisis by relying on their Christian faith.  While many books on crisis leadership (and general leadership theory, as a whole) tend to focus on the individual as the key component, this book will focus on the Christian faith as the major point of emphasis in crisis leadership.  Examples of how Christians have dealt with crisis in the past will be presented alongside specific examples from the Bible that reinforce the importance of faith in crisis leadership.  

             The focus of this book will be on crisis leadership instead of crisis management.  The distinction between the two is nuanced but is distinct and will be reinforced in the book but there may be a slight amount of overlap between the two in certain examples provided due to the quick reactions required during a crisis.  Much of the book will look at the attributes and behaviors seen in successful leaders and how faith can improve upon these two important areas for crisis leaders.

2.      What is crisis leadership?

Jeremiah 29:11  For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. 

1 Peter 5:1-4  The elders who are among you I exhort, I who am a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that will be revealed: Shepherd the flock of God which is among you, serving as overseers, not by compulsion but willingly, not for dishonest gain but eagerly; nor as being lords over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock; and when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that does not fade away.

            A crisis is generally defined as a situation that develops quickly and requires a response from a person or an organization in order to mitigate the consequences.  Boin, McConnell, and Hart in (Cuoto, 2010) describe the subtle difference between crisis management and crisis leadership in the following statement,

we should not assume that crises are simply bad news for leaders, with crisis management focused purely on damage limitation, both operationally and politically. Crises may also provide leaders with unique opportunities to discard old policies and commitments, kick-start new ones, reform public organizations, and reshape the political landscape by forging new coalitions.

Here the point is that the immediate clean up of and reaction to a crisis fit much better in the definition of crisis management while the leader who uses the crisis to improve the organization is conducting crisis leadership. 

            Much like how scholars have generally defined leadership and management as different entities, crisis leadership and crisis management will be similarly treated with crisis management concentrating more on an individual crisis and crisis leadership concentration on how different crisis can be compared and how leaders can prepare their organizations to better handle these situations (Mitroff, 2011).

Boin, McConnell, and Hart (in Cuoto) (2010) explained the importance of perception to crisis in the following definition: In sum, crises are the combined products of unusual events and shared perceptions that something is seriousl...