Media Management During COVID-19: Behavior of Swedish Media Leaders in Times of Crisis

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the majority of European countries, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Swedish authorities did not put the country in lockdown, but mainly presented relatively mild recommendations to work from home and not gather in groups of over 50 persons. Thus, much of the decision-making and restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus had to occur at the organizational level, i.e., within companies. This paper reports the findings from an online survey carried out in June–September 2020 (n = 196), in which Swedish media managers were asked to focus on perceived media leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. The results indicate that Swedish media managers acted with confidence in their remote leadership and engaged in crisis management leader tasks in line with previous crisis management research. While managers learned to appreciate remote work, they stressed the difficulty of being an inspiring leader in a remote setting and the challenge of motivating creativity, one of the most important components in managing journalism and media work.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• crisis management
• leadership behavior
• media management
• Sweden
• Virtual leadership

Introduction

During the COVID-19 pandemic, media organizations have had to not only cover the crisis but also tackle it from an organizational point of view. Even pre-crisis, media managers faced an unstable environment that required them to constantly adapt to technology and progressively abandon the old (Deuze 2011). This may have prepared the media industry well for handling the crisis, having survived business challenges such as the loss of audiences, the diminishing effectiveness of the mass media business model, the lingering effects of the economic crisis, and the impact of digital competitors (Picard 2014). Similar to other Western news media markets, the Swedish media industry has undergone rapid deregulation and extensive digitalization (Andersson and Wiik 2013, 706). A previous study of Swedish media leadership found that management was open to introducing new ideas into the organization and thus using its leadership to put together teams of different competences to promote innovation (Appelgren and Nygren 2019). In journalism studies, innovation has often been used as a synonym for a legitimate solution to changes in business philosophies, editorial strategy, and journalistic identity (Creech and Nadler 2018). However, Creech and Nadler argue that such a focus obscures the structural, historical, and cultural conditions exerting pressure on journalism. Rather than turning the attention to technological change, they suggest that it would be more fruitful to identify the values that should guide the design of a sustainable media infrastructure supporting democratic society, and researchers have pointed out that technological determinism, i.e., the power of technology as a crucial agent of change having layered the texture of everyday life (Smith and Marx 1994), would pass above journalistic values practices (García Orosa et al. 2020).

Leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic went virtual, and during the initial months of the pandemic this implied a need for managers to change. In a study of Danish managers and their employees during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kirchner, Ipsen, and Hansen (2021) found that because core leadership tasks, such as direct and informal face-to-face contact about work-related tasks, became nearly impossible, leaders had to change their traditional leadership habits to become more in sync with the changes in the task and work processes brought about by distance leadership. The rapid and instant change challenged media managers to maintain a good working environment while at the same time carrying out sustainable business operations. Digital technology has played an important role in the crisis by providing virtual opportunities not only for businesses and healthcare delivery but also for social connection and networking (Shah et al. 2020). Because previous research suggests that leadership in virtual teams is expressed through technology, managers and team members have to make sense of technology in order to make the most capable use of it (Zigurs 2003).

Additionally, through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Swedish case of media leadership is interesting in particular because of the additional leadership challenges Swedish managers may have faced due to the country’s mild restrictions. During the late spring of 2020, official guidelines consisted mainly of strong recommendations to work from home (WFH), not use public transportation unless absolutely necessary, and not meet in groups of more than 50 people (FHM 2020). At the time of the study, which was at the beginning of the pandemic, more than 3.9 billion people, i.e., half of the world’s population, were in lockdown (Sandford 2020), and during the early spring of 2020, of the forty-eight countries in Europe, only five (Belarus, Sweden, Iceland, Latvia and Hungary) had not imposed a national or local lockdown (Dunford et al. 2020). Because the Swedish strategy did not require a general lockdown, the closing of schools, or other WHO recommendations, such as wearing face masks, much of the decision-making and restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus had to occur at an organizational level, i.e., within companies. For example, in March 2020 before public recommendations were issued, companies in Sweden had already instructed their staff to WFH (Zachrisson 2020). Thus, even though the state regulations were less strict compared to other countries, some company managers made decisions to protect their staff. Other measures taken by some of the largest companies in Sweden included deciding on mass-testing for antibodies in May, which was in opposition to public recommendations (The Local 2020), or creating clear boundaries for staff on how to be able to work safely and yet still be productive.

According to Deuze (2011), media management studies should consider not only content, processes, and technology but also organizational life. Thus, drawing on an online survey sent in June 2020 to a sample of 1,008 Swedish media managers from the Medieledarna trade union, this study analyzes perceived media leadership during the COVID-19 crisis.

The following research questions are assessed:

RQ1: How did media managers perceive their leadership during the COVID-19 crisis?

RQ2: What have the managers learned from the crisis that they will continue doing in their leadership?

The questionnaire built on a model developed by Lim (2018) that assesses virtual leadership and relates to how the media managers perceived their leadership style during the crisis in terms of three dimensions: directive, supportive, and interpersonal. The results are analyzed in light of Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk’s (2013) framework for assessing crisis leadership and Jaques’s (2012) eight suggested top management leadership roles in times of crisis.

Media Management and Swedish Media Management

Since the media industry revolves around creative work, and workers tend to see themselves more as independent contractors than employees, media management has been described as being different than management in general (Deuze 2011). Deuze (2011) also argues that project- and teamwork-based media production tends to also involve the cultural context of what this particular context means to the people involved in the team. Furthermore, many studies on management in journalism place the journalistic practice in an institutional framework and focus on how decision-making in newsrooms and at a managerial level due to digitalization or a changing business environment affects the editorial content (See, for example, Andersson and Wiik 2013).

In a western context, professional autonomy is an integral part of the normative model of journalism, and at a practical level, certain routines and norms may limit journalists’ autonomy, as do organizational aspects such as ownership influences, management structures and editorial decisions (Sjøvaag 2020). However, routines and norms may also help journalists negotiate uncertainty, maximize resources and avoid conflict with the organization’s power structure and policies (Bunce 2019). If we shift focus to the managers, previous research on management in journalism has found that routines and norms can make it difficult for management to introduce new managerial priorities. For example, Bunce (2019) found that managerial change at Reuters affected journalists differently—newly appointed journalists tended to support changes by management, since they were more prone to “play the game,” while “old hires” struggled to adjust or even engaged in subtle forms of sabotage. Similarly, Ryfe (2009) observed that the culture of professionalism in the newsroom is resilient and resistant to change. In particular, the most experienced reporters did not respond well to deviations from their basic routines and practices because such deviations threatened their ability to find and transform information into news. According to Ryfe (2009), this made them unwilling to adapt to new managerial directives.

Within journalism, Swedish leaders are still mostly recruited from the journalistic staff (Waldenström, Wiik, and Andersson 2019). In a study of Swedish editors-in-chiefs, Andersson and Wiik (2013) found that these leaders have adopted values and beliefs tied to a managerial discourse mainly in terms of business goals and organizational change, positioning their role as managers above journalism. According to Andersson and Wiik (2013), this has created a paradox since quality in journalism is tied to journalistic standards of autonomy and self-regulation, while quality from a managerial perspective is closely tied to profitability and satisfying audience needs. Waldenström, Wiik, and Andersson (2019) found however, that while journalists often disagree with managers’ decisions, they do not object to their manager’s right to lead.

Swedish leadership has been described as different than Anglo/American leadership (Lämsä 2010), and in comparative studies of leadership across cultures, Swedish leaders have been found to rate claims of directive leadership considerably lower than leaders from other countries (see, for example, Euwema, Wendt, and Van Emmerik 2007; Wendt, Euwema, and Van Emmerik 2009). Swedish leadership typically embraces the tradition of managers involving people, and while this may take time, it leads to rapid acceptance when a decision is made. Thus, because group decisions are a core value, Swedish employees expect their leaders to have a consensual and informal leadership style, where mutual decisions are essential (Lämsä 2010). According to Holmberg and Åkerblom (2006), Swedish middle managers consider an outstanding leader to have the skills to inspire and engage the organization to do their best to achieve a visionary future and create team spirit. Such a leader should be honest and trustworthy and work for the common good of the organization. They should be teamwork-oriented, promoting collaboration and consultation rather than supervision and instruction. Holmberg and Åkerblom (2006) also found that Swedish leaders believe they should not be self-centered, status-conscious or non-participative.

Crisis Management and Management During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Jaques (2012) suggests that crisis management should be regarded as a prolonged process rather than an isolated event. Based on previous research, Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk (2013) formulated a framework for assessing leadership performance before, during, and after a crisis, and they define crisis management as “the sum of activities aimed at minimizing the impact of a crisis” (p.4). Boin et al.’s framework consists of ten tasks: (1) early recognition, where leaders have an organizational system in place to act on weak signals; (2) sensemaking, where leaders have developed a method to process information, share it with the right people and consider their feedback, creating a dynamic picture that everybody understands, analyzing possible “futures” and potential consequences, and formulating specific information needs; (3) making critical decisions, where leaders concern themselves with strategic issues and avoid becoming entangled in operational decision making, i.e., not engaging in micro management; (4) orchestrating vertical and horizontal coordination, where the leader finds a balance between persuasion and command and control to make sure units that may not have cooperated before do so; (5) coupling and decoupling, where the leader can “island” the problem—allowing the system to “fail gracefully”—while protecting as many core functions as possible; (6) meaning-making, where the leader, to ensure legitimacy of the organization, provides an effective story that relates the events to the core values of the organization, confirming the crisis management efforts; (7) communication, where the leader explains the crisis, its consequences, and what is being done to minimize the consequences, and in addition offers “actionable advice,” explaining what should be done, by whom, and why; (8) rendering accountability, where the leader explains what was done before and during the crisis and evaluates the outcome in order to restore trust; (9) learning, where the leader has the capacity to learn from mistakes and adapt by learning; and (10) enhancing resilience, where the leader ensures that there is flexibility in the organization and a capacity to rapidly adapt in the face of negative feedback.

Quite similar to the ten tasks in Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk’s (2013) framework and specifically focusing on the leadership role during a crisis, Jaques (2012) suggests eight traits based on how CEO’s themselves would describe their crisis leadership: how the leader can encourage proactivity, engage in open and upward communication, learn, assess risks, establish and enforce standard and processes, prioritize and set an example, build relationships before the crisis, and be ready to deal with the news media.

Based on a literature study and case studies, Dirani et al. (2020) argues that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders have to provide strong roles and purpose, share leadership, communicate, ensure employee’s access to technology, prioritize employee’s emotional stability, maintain organizational financial health and promote organizational resilience.

Previous research has found that earlier crises, such as the financial crisis in 2008, result in an increase in directive leadership (Stoker, Garretsen, and Soudis 2019). In a study of leadership in the service industries during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bartsch et al. (2020) found that managing leadership behavior that is strongly focused on coordinating tasks, clarifying expectations, and establishing well-defined patterns for team members was very important, in particular when virtual team structures were not well-established. While directive leadership behavior has been linked to negative effects for team performance in previous research, Bartsch et al. (2020) found that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, firms with a high level of digital maturity had weaker negative effects from directive leadership behavior. Their recommendation to leaders in crisis was to use a balance between managing leadership behavior and enabling leadership behavior.

Virtual Management

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, many employees are working from home. Because the leadership is expressed through technology (Zigurs 2003), it is thus relevant to consider previous research on remote leadership behavior. In the literature, several terms are used, one of them being virtual teams. Zigurs (2003) defines a virtual team as “a collection of individuals who are geographically and/or organizationally or otherwise dispersed and who collaborate via communication and information technologies in order to accomplish a specific goal” (p.340). The goal or the tasks are varied, and Bell and Kozlowski (2002, 14) argue that such tasks range from the simple (e.g., brainstorming) to the complex (e.g., command and control). To measure leadership behavior in virtual teams, Lim (2018) used a survey built on a large body of leadership research and relied upon a principal component factor analysis of the self-reported behavior. Lim (2018) identified three types of leadership behavior occurring in virtual teams: directive; supportive and interpersonal.

Research about virtual teamwork emphasizes benefits for both the employee and the employer, such as increased job satisfaction due to the flexibility to work remotely and access to global experts (Liao 2017). However, Liao (2017) argues that benefits only appear if the teams are well-managed. Therefore, virtual leaders have to invest more time and effort into helping coordinate virtual team tasks, building relationships among distributed members, and facilitation (Liao 2017). Zigurs (2003) argues that virtual teams cannot rely on transferring their behavior from traditional teams to be successful; in fact, even though familiar practices are preferred, these can function as a barrier to creativity. According to Zigurs (2003), the leadership has to play itself out in an environment where trust among the members is difficult to build, influence is difficult to express, self-leadership among the team members is required, and communication often is ambiguous. Leaders in traditional meetings make their presence known, for example with their position in the room and their body language, but these cues are lost in the virtual environment. In the virtual setting, the leader must achieve a “telepresence” to be effective (344). Furthermore, structure is important (Bell and Kozlowski 2002; Zigurs 2003). According to Bell and Kozlowski (2002), in virtual settings, leaders thus need to be proactive in terms of anticipating problems and providing clear direction and goals to help team members regulate their own performance.

According to Küng (2017), comfort with new technology is negatively correlated with age among media leaders. Because top leaders in the media industry tend to belong to older generations, technological skills are located lower down and at the periphery of media organizations. Nevertheless, the media industry has always been dependent on technology, although its self-identity is defined and shaped by the act of content creation (Küng 2017). Sylvie et al. (2009, 41) argue that for leaders in creative organizations to be successful, they need to develop a culture that gives employees a high level of autonomy in their work and risk-taking and permits failure. If leaders monitor, critique and control, creativity will suffer. Nevertheless, the increased professionalization of newsroom management has introduced not only managerialism but also a focus from news management on more than simply editorial content: responsibility for strategic, financial and technical decisions (Waldenström, Wiik, and Andersson 2019).

Leaders’ Ability to Change

Media leaders hold dual roles in their organizations: they are both managers with organizational aims and business goals and part of an editorial culture in an institution where professional norms and routines are central. In journalism, organizations’ top editors (journalists who have the highest hierarchical position in the organization) are seen as the primary source of journalistic expertise and are expected to be advocates for journalism (Gade 2008). In this context, editors are conflicted by motives and values associated with change.

According to Borgen (2017), since the turn of the twenty-first century, Nordic media managers have experienced an increase in the importance of systematic leadership skills for media managers. This is in tune with, yet somewhat behind, a general trend of increasing professionalization in leadership and human resource management skills in the general Nordic business society (Borgen 2017). Leadership styles of news managers play a key role in motivating journalists to keep up with change (Powers and Zhao 2018). According to Hersey, Blanchard, and Natemeyer (1979), how a leader possesses and uses power can affect the leadership style, and if the leader assesses their own uses of power, they are able to change the way they lead.

During the early stages of the pandemic, Daraba et al. (2021) found that employees needed support from their leaders to secure and restore their psychological resources. Typical for the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic was that many employees and their managers had to work from home (WFH), and according to Daraba et al. (2021) working from home brought changes to employee’s work life, including how they perceived leadership. For those who previously did not work from home, this was a change of organizational context, where the interactions between leaders and followers become different as tasks and interactions were performed digitally (Daraba et al. 2021). Thus, because of this organizational change, at the early stages of the pandemic we can assume that the leadership in media companies where employees worked from home was transformed, at least temporarily.

Methods and Measures

This study is based on an online survey with members of the Swedish trade union Medieledarna, a union for top and middle managers in the media industry. At the time of the survey, the trade union had 1,108 registered members with a valid email address. The original invitation to the survey was sent out on 6/25/2020, and an additional six reminders resulted in a response rate of 18% (196 responses). The sample consisted of an almost equal distribution of men and women, roughly half of the respondents were over the age of 50, and the majority of the respondents had been managers for more than 10 years (Table 1). Almost two-thirds of the sample are middle managers. As shown in Table 2, 40% work in printed news media, 25% in public service TV or radio, 10% in digital media and 17% in other types of media companies.

Table 1. Background of the sample of media managers (n = 196).

Background information		Frequencies
Gender	Female	93
	Male	101
	Prefer not to say	1
Age	≤35	9
	36–50	86
	≥51	99
Years as a manager	Less than 1 year	2
	1–3 years	19
	4–6 years	24
	7–10 years	27
	10 years or more	122
Years within the company	Less than 1 year	8
	1–3 years	26
	4–6 years	21
	7–10 years	27
	10 years or more	113
Type of manager	Top management (publisher, editor-in-chief, and other editorial)	47
	Non-editorial manager (technology, business and development, marketing, HR, etc.)	81
	Middle management (editorial)	56
	Non-manager (team leader, project manager, etc.)	8
Type of media company	Public service broadcaster	50
	Commercial TV or radio	10
	National newspaper	13
	Regional or local newspaper	50
	Digital native company	21
	Other	52

Table 2. Frequencies, means and standard deviations for the perceived performance of certain leadership tasks during crisis. Prompt: To what extent do you … ?. Scale: 1: Not at all to 5: To a very large extent.

Items	To a very large/large extent	Means	SD
You have mastered technology for digital meetings	92%	4.39	.747
You have been able to be transparent about the functionality of your organization	90%	4.32	1.104
Digital meetings fulfill their purpose	83%	3.98	.854
You feel confident about leading remotely	56%	3.62	1.279
In your opinion, you are good at coaching employees remotely	74%	3.36	1.172
Your leadership has changed	55%	3.27	1.19
Your workload has increased	40%	3.1	1.258
You have personally been worried about the crisis	15%	2.24	1.096

Because the survey is intended to cover general aspects of the working environment for the Swedish media managers and was created on commission by the Medieledarna trade union, the number of questions in the survey instrument is large. It consisted of 98 questions in total and had one specific section about leadership during COVID-19 used in for this study. One question included an adapted version of Lim’s 15 leadership items (2018). These items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (agree). While these leadership types were developed from previous research on leadership behavior, they were designed for self-leadership behavior among any member of a virtual team. In this study, these items were adapted to the manager in a virtual team setting, i.e., during the COVID-19 crisis. Furthermore, the items were translated to Swedish, the tempus was changed from imperfect to present, the word team members was replaced with employees, and the wording this team or this project was omitted in order to ensure that the items dealt with meetings in general during the coronavirus crisis that were led by the manager answering the survey. For example, the first item in Lim’s model was changed from “I made most decisions for team members in this project” to “During the crisis, I make most decisions for my employees.” Additionally, smaller changes were made to the wording of the questions to fit the Swedish language. One of the questions in this study contained 14 items measuring aspects of the perceived leadership role. These items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (agree). A question with 19 dichotomous items related to different leadership tasks. These last two questions were developed in a collaboration between the researcher and the board of Medieledarna.

There are limitations to the study. The survey was sent out in June, and reminders were sent out in part during the Swedish general industrial holiday. This might have contributed to the relatively low response rate of the study. Furthermore, even though the questions are aimed at capturing behavior during the crisis, the crisis was far from over when the survey was sent out. Therefore, the results of this study are premature and can only relate to the initial part of the crisis.

Results

This section is structured around the three research questions of the study. The descriptive results are analyzed in light of Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk’s (2013) framework for assessing crisis leadership and Jaques’s (2012) leadership roles in times of crisis. While previous research relates to different phases of a crisis, this study is limited in that it only deals with the initial phase. Therefore, only some of the traits suggested in the framework are relevant for the study.

Perceived Leadership During the COVID-19 Crisis

In June 2020, at the time of this study, 76% of the media managers reported that their employees worked from home, and only 2% stated that all their employees worked in the company office (Table 1). Forty percent stated that their workload had increased to a very large/large extent. Only 15% have personally been worried about the crisis.

The first research question focused on how the managers perceived their leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. More than half of the managers perceived their leadership to have changed to a very large/large extent during the pandemic, and only 3% stated that it had not changed at all. More than half of the media managers demonstrate confidence in terms of their perceived remote leadership (56%). As noted in previous research, using technological tools such as videoconferencing is important for virtual meetings, and this is a central part of being able to communicate efficiently and maintain relationships through what Zigurs (2003) denotes as telepresence. When asked to what extent they mastered technology, digital meetings fulfilled their purpose; more than 80% perceive that they were able to master technology to a very large or large extent (see Table 1).

One of the traits of crisis management as suggested by Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk (2013) is sensemaking, i.e., encouraging communication and explaining events so people understand. It is also similar to the recommendation by Jaques (2012) to carry out open and upward communication. A clear majority (90%) of the Swedish media managers stated that they have been able to be transparent about how the organization is going to function during the crisis, indicating that such communication occurred.

Table 2 illustrates leadership tasks related to the crisis, and the results indicate that almost all managers have hosted (92%) or participated in remote meetings (94%). Liao (2017) argues that virtual leadership is more challenging than in-real-life leadership. Nevertheless, the majority of the managers in this study reported that digital meetings fulfill their purpose (83%), and 74% agree to that they to a large extent are good at coaching employees remotely.

Part of the crisis management framework (Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk 2013) is making critical decisions. Even though only 13% of the respondents headed the organization’s crisis management group (Table 3) and only 43% of the respondents were part of a crisis management group, 73% of the respondents felt that they had the authority to make their own decisions.

Table 3. Crisis management leadership tasks. Prompt: During the crisis, I have … Scale: Yes or No.

Tasks	Frequencies	N
Participated in remote meetings	94%	183
Hosted remote meetings	92%	179
Had the authority to take my own decisions about how to adapt	77%	150
Implemented decisions about adaptations from others in my organization	62%	121
Supervised others who manage work remotely	53%	104
Had meetings across the organization with other managers/managing groups	52%	102
Participated in the crisis management group of my organization	43%	83
Worked with HR tasks to a larger extent than before the crisis	36%	71
Had to carry out furlough and lay-offs	32%	63
Participated in networks with other organizations because of the crisis	22%	42
Not experienced any notable difference in terms of how we work in my organization	17%	34
Worked with technological tasks to a larger extent than before the crisis	15%	30
Worked with editorial tasks to a larger extent than before	15%	29
Headed the organization's crisis management group	13%	25
Worked with market-oriented tasks to a larger extent than before	10%	19

Another of the crisis management leadership tasks is to orchestrate vertical and horizontal coordination (Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk 2013). While the survey did not ask whether the manager had promoted such activities, 52% of the respondents reported that they had participated in cross-sectional meetings and 22% reported that they had participated in networks outside of the organization. Here, I observed an association between gender and participation in meetings: 65% of the women and 42% of the men reported they had participated in the internal cross-sectional meetings (χ²(2) = 11.309, p < .01, Cramer’s V = 0.241, p < .01).

In terms of new tasks, about 36% of the respondents worked with HR tasks to a greater extent and 15% worked with both editorial and technological tasks. Thirty-two percent had to carry out furloughs/let go of employees.

Table 4 presents frequencies of those who reported they fully agreed, means and standard deviations for the leadership behavior items based on Lim (2018). While the majority of the respondents did not fully agree with the directive leadership items, many “partly agreed” with a large number of the directive leadership items. In fact, when those who reported they agree or partly agree were taken together, 57% of the managers agreed/partly agreed that they take the majority of the decisions concerning the employees, 40% agreed/partly agreed that they expect their employees to follow their instructions precisely, and 37% tried to monitor their members closely. Lim (2018) similarly found that directive leadership behavior was used together with supportive leadership behavior.

Table 4. Means and standard deviations for leadership behavior items.

Leadership style	Items	Agree (%)	Means	SD
Directive	I make the majority of the decisions that concern my employees	33	3.59	1.306
	I have to lay out goals and guidelines in order for my employees to get things done	12	2.75	1.298
	I expect my employees to follow my instructions precisely	13	3.18	1.167
	I let my employees know what will happen if their work is unsatisfactory.	5	2.24	1.247
	I try to monitor team members very closely	15	2.99	1.299
	I require employees to submit reports of their assigned work	6	2.05	1.213
Supportive	I try to develop close personal relationships with my employees	37	3.88	1.073
	I demonstrate concern for my employees	46	4.27	.820
	I believe my employees’ feelings are as important as the task on hand	21	3.56	1.037
	I rely on what I learn from my employees and use each person’s talents	31	3.93	.907
	I work hard to ease tensions whenever they arise.	41	4.07	.967
	I encourage employees to talk to me about personal problems	23	3.60	1.047
Inter-personal	I personally help employees when it is clear their workload is too high.	34	3.94	1.017
	I take the initiative to help orient employees even though it is not required.	25	3.81	.962
	I lend a helping hand to my employees when needed.	56	4.44	.733

Even though previous research revealed that managers often increase their directive leadership in crises (Stoker, Garretsen, and Soudis 2019), the lowest support for the different leadership styles is found for directive leadership, with only 5% of the managers fully agreeing with the claim “I let my employees know what will happen if their work is unsatisfactory,” followed by “I require employees to submit reports of their assigned work.” As seen in Table 4, four of the items that are characterized as directive leadership have a mean below 3 compared to interpersonal and supportive leadership items, meaning that respondents tended to not agree with the directive leadership claims while at the same time agreeing or partly agreeing to a larger extent with supportive and interpersonal claims. However, previous research has emphasized the need for a balance between directive and supportive leadership in crisis management (Bartsch et al. 2020). More than half of the managers tend to fully agree with the interpersonal claim “I lend a helping hand to my employees when needed,” and almost half (46%) of the managers fully agree with another interpersonal claim, “I demonstrate concern for my employees.”

What the Managers Learned from the Crisis

The second research question was assessed by summarizing the qualitative answers reported in two open survey questions. One dealt with the challenges that the crisis has entailed for the organization and the other with which changes managers believed they would continue with once the crisis was over.

The majority of the comments regarding challenges were related to typical aspects for a leader in the creative industries as suggested by Deuze (2011), including the difficulty of not meeting in person to keep the energy flowing in the organization, spur creativity and motivate employees. Several comments indicated that this task is extremely important for managers in the media industry and in particular in journalism. The working environment was a challenge; not being able to supervise how the employees were feeling and what they were doing. For example, video conferencing limited some managers’ ability to read body language. Several comments pointed out that the journalistic process was suffering:

News media has to be present. This can be difficult since the geographic spread of the editorial offices has meant that some employees must travel on public transportation to get there. To some extent there have been fewer political and business events to cover, but covering them [during the crisis] has required ingenuity and innovation.

Furthermore, the challenge of attending to daily problems in what usually was a spontaneous manner now had to be scheduled and planned in digital meetings. The increase of structure was considered a barrier rather than something positive. Notably, however, managers also commented that their employees asked for a more direct and hierarchical leadership style.

I spend all of my time in meetings and follow-up meetings. I am not able to start working on my own deliveries until 8 PM. There is so much extra work. My employees refer more decisions to me than they did before [the crisis], and they ask more questions.

The comment above also relates to two of the traits for crisis management identified by Jaques (2012): follow-up meetings enable leaders to establish and enforce standards and processes. The increased number of meetings also helps with prioritization. Managers also commented that it was not possible to summarize the challenges of the crisis as a whole. Rather, the crisis had so far consisted of several phases, as expressed in this comment:

One challenge for me was that I was cut off from what was happening at the office and with the employees who were still there [once we started to work from home]. During the initial, most intense phase, I did not work from home. I had to go into the office since the majority of my employees were there. They started to get anxious if a manager was not present.

In the quote above, the manager expresses a need to be present in the office to be able to neutralize or mediate. This motive behind their presence is possibly part of the traits suggested by Jaques (2012) to enforce standards and processes and prioritize and set an example. It may also be part of building relationships with the employees.

One comment stood out because of its informative and summative nature of the crisis:

Professionally, the coronavirus crisis has been both constructive and destructive. The entire advertising market collapsed at the same time as news consumption increased, which has meant that the entire reader business has become significantly more important. This in turn has led to my organization suddenly becoming much more interested in the journalism we produce—and it was no longer just about attracting readers but to an even greater extent retaining them. Content has become the company's survival issue in a way that is completely different than before. The coronavirus crisis has also been a fantastic time to work in journalism in terms of news, but the workload has been enormous, especially after SJF employees (Swedish Union for Journalists) were laid off part-time, increasing the news coverage demanded from us.

Seventy-four of the respondents answered the open question about which of the working methods or other changes implemented during the coronavirus crisis the organization would continue with after the crisis. The most common answer was related to the positive shift in attitude toward remote work within the organization. Some managers perceived remote work to have actually increased productivity, and they considered offering employees the possibility in the future to combine WFH and working at the office. Many comments concerned how the crisis has resulted in better skills in using technology:

Digitalization was boosted in several respects, and I hope we can benefit from this in the future. It's not just about digital meetings, but also about reporters’ ability to think and work digitally.

Mangers perceived that employees appreciate also their attempts to create daily check-in meeting and engage in a more structured leadership style:

Employees appreciate that the work is more controlled. Following up is an important part of being able to provide confirmation for what they do.

The need for more structured leadership was also illustrated by what will continue to be done once the crisis is over:

Shorter follow-up meetings. It is evident that our sessions are sometimes much too long and do not have clear goals.

Furthermore, some comments noted that it will be necessary to change the layout of the office, from open landscape to individual rooms. Another frequent observation in the comments was the change in meeting culture: managers had learned during the crisis to hold shorter and more efficient meetings both digitally and in person physical meetings. Furthermore, changed travel policies were mentioned in several comments, where managers expect to restrict travelling considerably now that they have learned that it is possible to host both internal meetings inside the organization and external digital meetings with clients.

Discussion and Conclusions

The COVID-19 pandemic forms an excellent case for investigating change during a crisis. Characteristic for this crisis was that technology became central for leadership. Since employees needed to work from home, much of the communication had to rely on video conferencing technology, reliable Wi-Fi and digital collaborative work, all of which forced technological change. However, in this context the technology was not the driver; it was the enabler.

In research literature, the management of journalists in times of change seems to be an unrewarding task since journalists tend to blame newsroom managers for mismanaging change (Gade 2008). There is also resistance from journalists to adopt managerial requests for new practices (Ryfe 2009). However, in terms of a crisis, such as the pandemic, outside threats have forced organizations to make employees work from home (Kirchner, Ipsen, and Hansen 2021), and as a consequence leadership went virtual. In this study, more than half of the managers that responded to the survey perceived that their leadership had changed to a very large or large extent during the pandemic. This study cannot answer what the journalists in the newsrooms made of their leader’s perceived change, but the results contribute with the managers’ perceived conscious and structured attempts to lead in the new virtual context.

Because research on management in journalism has primarily focused on resistance to permanent changes affecting editorial processes and journalistic autonomy, this study contributes with contrasting results. While the results present a snapshot, the results actually indicate that the managers carried out short-term changes and intend to continue with some of the new practices once the pandemic is over, such as opening up for remote work, hosting shorter and more efficient meetings, and changing travel policies.

The majority of the media managers in the sample had at least a decade of management experience. It is thus expected that they would express confidence in terms of their leadership, even though the pandemic implied remote leadership. The survey results indicate that the managers to some extent were engaging in crisis management activities that Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk (2013) describe, such as sensemaking, critical decision-making, and encouragement of vertical and horizontal communication, and communication. When looking at the eight traits for crisis management as described by Jaques (2012), mainly the traits to establish and enforce standard and processes, prioritization and relationship building were found in the survey results, expressed in part by an increased need for clarity and structure, follow-up meetings and frequent use of digital meetings.

In addition to previous research on crisis management, the findings of this study suggest additional activities connected to virtual crisis management. While crisis management is about minimizing the impact of a crisis to the organization (Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk 2013), the COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges for managers in terms of having to transform and adapt internal processes in order for employees to WFH. Managers at media companies had to relocate and reorganize operations to prioritize selected news operations, take health-related precautions for staff members, and announce and carry out furlough and lay-offs. They had to lead through technology (Zigurs 2003), such as relying on video conferencing tools, and ensure that the majority of their staff collaborated in virtual settings. Thus, involving people, which is one of the typical traits of Swedish leadership, seems to have been difficult in a virtual setting. However, the reason for this perceived difficulty could be that most managers were beginners at virtual leadership. Furthermore, since virtual leadership according to previous research come with a need for a directive leadership style, the ideal Swedish leadership style, i.e., the encouragement of mutual decision-making and collaborative work rather than top-down directives, became an additional challenge in the transition to virtual leadership.

The first research question focused on how media managers perceived their leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. They reported that digital meetings had been functional and they had mastered the technology. This confidence could be explained by the mature level of technological adoption among Swedish media organizations and that the rapid change in terms of implementing technology and seeing innovation as a strength in the organizational life (Appelgren and Nygren 2019) might have been beneficial in coping with the crisis. Naturally, because the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that people WFH to prevent the spread of the virus in society, what primarily was found in terms of the specifics of this crisis was the emphasis on digital and remote leadership through the use of virtual meetings. Technology for virtual meetings has been essential for the managers, and this constitutes an example of how technology has been part of setting the groundwork for how to conduct meetings during the pandemic, maintain relationships, and facilitate processes and cooperation within the organization to keep producing content. The design and functionality of the tools used for virtual meetings dictate how a meeting is conducted and perceived by the participants, but it is unclear to what extent it actually dictates the content of the meeting and whether it is dependent on the level of familiarity that the manager has with the virtual meeting technology. The dependence on time and experience for using the technology is perhaps an interesting area for future research. Thus, rather than denoting the virtual meeting as an example of technological determinism that has determined social and cultural changes, I would argue that it is an example of what Hughes (1994) denotes as technological momentum, i.e., that social development shapes, and is shaped by, technology (102). Momentum thus sits in between technological determinism and social construction and offers an alternative to them. The managers who answered this survey expressed that digital meetings are largely fulfilling their purpose, and they felt confident in their leadership role during this specific phase of the pandemic. It is thus possible that their relatively mature technological competence contributed to that technology being viewed as momentum rather than functioning in a deterministic manner with regard to their leadership behavior.

While leadership in crisis management also involves not becoming entangled in operational decision-making (Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk 2013), previous research has found that leaders have practiced increased directive leadership during crises (Stoker, Garretsen, and Soudis 2019). Furthermore, recent research on leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that this may not be entirely negative if balanced by supportive leadership, such as engaging in open communication by communicating to restore trust and the establishment of relationships, ensuring employee’s access to technology, and prioritizing employee’s emotional stability (Bartsch et al. 2020). Thus, previous research tends to recommend a balance, much depending on the task at hand and the phase of the crisis. With the limitation of this study to a snapshot in time, future research could investigate perceived leadership behavior once the crisis is over and ask managers to reflect on the different phases of leadership they went through as the crisis progressed. In this study, the results indicate that during the first phase of the pandemic, the Swedish media managers tended to engage in both interpersonal and supportive leadership, and to a smaller extent also directive leadership. In Lim’s study, supportive leadership in virtual meetings was sometimes used when the leader wanted to influence others to follow certain instructions, given that there are no formal hierarchical differences among members of virtual teams (2018, p.86).

The managers tended to agree most with the interpersonal claims, which can be tied to the nature of this crisis, but in the specific case of Swedish leadership, they also agreed with cultural norms on how to behave as a leader in general. Swedish leaders have been found to favor inspirational behavior within the organization and the creation of team spirit (Holmberg and Åkerblom 2006), and because a consensual and informal leadership style is the norm, directive leadership traits are not favored (Lämsä 2010). In crises, previous research has found a need for a balance between directive and supportive leadership (Bartsch et al. 2020). The non-preference for directive leadership may be a sign of the specific nature of the journalistic workplace, where the individual autonomy of the employee is important. The manager thus needs to protect autonomy and the well-being of the journalistic staff to make sure operations run smoothly and news is produced.

The second question focused on what the managers had learned from the crisis that they will continue with in their leadership. Notably, in this study, it was found that about 55% of the managers stated that their leadership had changed during the pandemic. However, due to the limitation of this study in that it did not measure pre-crisis leadership behavior, I can only speculate on what kinds of changes the managers made. The free text comments indicate that their perceived changes had to do with constraints from using technology to achieve a desirable communication with the employees. For example, in the majority of free text comments, managers expressed the difficulty of being inspirational in a remote setting, reading body language, and knowing how employees were feeling. Furthermore, they stressed how hard it was to find ways to motivate their employees through the computer screen.

Deuze (2011) argues that media management is different than management in general. The findings of this study suggest that crisis management in the media industry may be different as well. The creative nature of the journalistic profession can help understand these differences. Firstly, the findings of the study indicate that, due to the nature of the crisis, managers turned to technology to overcome difficulties. Therefore, in this case, technology was not dictating processes in a deterministic way but supporting novel needs for leadership created by the situation. Küng (2017) suggests that the media industry has always been dependent on technology, and as a result this close relationship might have been an advantage in overcoming the transition to virtual leadership. Secondly, because journalists traditionally are used to a high level of autonomy, they would be more accustomed to the practice of self-leadership, a key characteristic of successful virtual work (Zigurs 2003). However, as the free-text comments revealed, the editorial managers most likely found it challenging to have to promote journalistic expertise and serve as an advocate for journalism (Gade 2008) while at the beginner’s level of virtual management at the start of the pandemic. Thus, for a media manager to be prepared for a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, this study suggests that a new key skill would be to practice virtual motivation techniques in order to inspire employees despite the virtual setting.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Medieledarna for access to the member database and valuable help with analysis of the results. Furthermore, the author wishes to thank Megan Owens for proof-reading and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work of this article was partly supported by Medieledarna, the union for Swedish Media Leaders.