TAMPA — When a crisis strikes, many voters look for leaders who promise to shake up the status quo. But does being a political outsider actually help when the stakes are highest?
That's the question Lin Jiang, associate professor in USF's School of Management in the Muma College of Business and the Nault Center for Entrepreneurship, set out to answer in a new study published in Organization Science, one of the world's leading management journals.
The paper, "Outsiders at the Helm: When Institutional Outsiderness Helps or Hurts Public Leaders' Crisis Management Performance," examines how leaders with little political experience responded during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis.
One of the study's most unexpected findings was that the effectiveness of outsider leaders varied depending on the crisis.
Lin Jiang, PhD
"On average, institutional outsiders performed worse when managing a crisis like COVID, but not when managing the 2008 financial crisis," Jiang said. "That contrast surprised us and opens up avenues for future research."
The findings suggest that leadership during a crisis is shaped not only by who is in charge but also by the circumstances they face.
The project began in spring 2020, when the pandemic raised an urgent question about the role leaders play during public crises. Rather than studying the event years later, Jiang and her co-authors collected data as the crisis unfolded, allowing their ideas to evolve alongside the rapidly changing situation.
"Because we were all living through the same crisis, the work also became deeply personal," Jiang said. "We were determined to solve a puzzle we found so practically important that we didn't much care where it would eventually be published."
The publication marks the culmination of six years of work and a collaboration that stretched across countries and disciplines. Although the three researchers — Jiang, Dong Liu from Georgia Tech, and Yan Yu from Renmin University — spent countless hours meeting virtually, they gathered in person only once, at Renmin University in China, where a long discussion over coffee helped move the project forward.
The research examined U.S. state governors during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis, to see whether their lack of political experience helped or hurt their crisis management response.
The results? Outsider governors performed worse under certain conditions; when states had heavy bureaucracy or they hadn't personally managed a similar crisis before. However, when these obstacles were absent, outside leaders did just as well, and in some cases, performed better in states with lighter bureaucracy.
The research also changed Jiang's perspective on leadership.
"I used to think of outsiders as a poor fit for crisis management," she said. "This research shows that outsider leadership isn't inherently bad for managing a crisis. What matters is how effectively these leaders can implement the changes a crisis demands."
Other important takeaways:
- As more people with no political experience win office and major crises grow more frequent, this research tells voters and governments that an outsider's effectiveness isn't fixed by their résumé.
- Highly institutionalized environments governed by dense rules and regulations can make it more challenging for outsiders to manage public crises.
Completing the study wasn't without challenges. The team ventured beyond its expertise in management into political science and public administration, then expanded the project after reviewers encouraged them to test their framework beyond COVID-19. That meant assembling historical data on U.S. governors during the 2008 financial crisis, a time-consuming process that ultimately strengthened the research.
For Jiang, the project began with a simple question during one of the most uncertain moments in recent history. Six years later, the answers offer a new perspective on what it takes to lead when the stakes are highest.