Purpose: This paper seeks to extend our understanding of the concept of crisis leadership based on perceptions of 48 Australian leaders drawn from various sectors including Australian politics, higher education, not-for-profit and corporate sectors.

Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative study employed semi-structured virtual interviews of 48 leaders from Australian politics, higher education, not-for-profit and corporate sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Leximancer text analytics program was used for data analysis.

Findings: Participants perceived effective leadership during a crisis as encompassing four macro themes: leadership as power, leadership as emanating from people, leadership as management, and leadership as specific to the organization. While these findings reinforced extant literature on facets of effective leadership, leaders from different sectors differed on the relative importance of some leadership themes and their relevance to specific sectors.

Research limitations/implications: While the data were collected from a convenient sample, our findings from multiple sectors in Australia extend our knowledge on crisis leadership by revealing differences in sectorial perspectives of crisis leadership. Further, these findings help refine the extant traditional explanations of leadership and especially offer an enhanced understanding of leadership during a crisis. Consequently, our findings
support future research that could help identify specific attributes of leaders navigating organizational crises. Such future research could subsequently help develop a theory on crisis leadership based on a valid and reliable measurement for assessing crisis leadership effectiveness in diverse organizational settings.

Practical implications: Our findings provide a basis for practitioners in specific sectors to craft policies that promote effective leader behaviours and enhance individual and group success within organizations during times of crisis. Additionally, organizations could provide targeted leader development programs that enhance leadership effectiveness appropriate for their sectoral contexts and the needs of their employees.

Originality: Our study is based on multi-sector data, and consequently lays a solid foundation for extending the conceptualisation of leadership during a crisis, and the need to reconceptualise effective leader attributes useful in crisis contexts. Theoretically, the current study extended recent research on crisis leadership, by examining the conceptualizations of crisis leadership within specific Australian sectors.

Key Words: Crisis leadership, power, people, management, organization, political leaders, not-for-profit, higher education, corporation, COVID-19.