Leading Under Crisis: The Decision-Making Process of Texas School Superintendents During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, school district administrators faced significant obstacles due to the crisis’s social and health impacts on staff members, students, and families. As the global pandemic presented new threats to school leaders, operational difficulties remained. The combination of old and new threats created additional complications for many school environments, making it more difficult for school leaders to respond to daily changes. The study was an investigation of the correlation between the self-reported leadership practices of leaders of large and small- to medium-sized districts. It was an assessment of how demographic factors and school district size influenced school district administrators’ decision-making processes during the global shutdown. Kouzes and Posner’s Leadership Practice Inventory and Hadley et al.’s Crisis Leader Efficacy in Assessing and Deciding scale were the instruments used to measure school administrators’ self-reported leadership abilities and performances during the crisis. Random stratified sampling from 800 Texas school districts produced a sample of 60 participants whose survey responses underwent analysis in SPSS to measure participants’ leadership skills. The study’s findings contribute to the literature on crisis decision-making to equip and leverage leaders’ ability during sudden, unpredictable events. Participants’ responses led to recommendations for future crises that were not limited to learning from the past but to designing a crisis decision-making framework suitable to a constantly evolving environment.