Leadership in the Time of Covid

The Covid pandemic has put all modern societies to a serious test of resilience. The interdisciplinary research on which this book is based examined how four European governments behaved in these circumstances. During the months of the crisis, the team of experts coordinated by the editors of this volume took a close look at the decision-making processes in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia – the so-called Visegrad Four.
The inquiries focused on experiences from the academic, health, economic and social fields. The methods of comparison included surveys, interviews, discourse analysis, for which the adaptive leadership theory provided the conceptual framework.
The conclusions are both academic and practical. Aside the description of the pandemic responses, the research had a formative dimension: how can an adaptive leadership approach better help societies manage the health and societal impacts of similar challenges? The spectrum of emerging anti-democratic tendencies in the region provided the specific context of the exercise. Each of the four states faces varying degrees of threat from democratic backsliding as well as illiberal influences that have affected their response to the pandemic. This problematization gives research on the Visegrad Four worldwide resonance.