Leadership during the war: perceptions of ideal leadership among public leaders in Ukraine

Scholars have demonstrated that collectivistic forms of leadership can facilitate the exercise of managerial and leadership roles in complex networks of service delivery, thereby having positive outcomes for organizational ambidexterity in public sector (Ospina, 2017; Döös and Wilhelmson, 2021; Zhu et al., 2018; Jakobsen et al., 2021). Ospina (2017) explains the need for collectivistic approach in public leadership by complex contexts with multi-level accountability and performance followed by flattened structures, decentralized decision-making and self-managed teams (Ospina, 2017, p. 280). Bryson et al. (2006) explain distribution in leadership through leadership roles of “situated agents” in various contexts.

Distributed leadership has been described as post-heroic leadership comprising sharing of power, responsibility and decision making among multiple members of an organization (Spillane, 2005; Crevani et al., 2007; Friedrich et al., 2016; Škerlavaj, 2022). Döös and Wilhelmson (2021) argue that distributed leadership is, in turn, one aspect of the more comprehensive concept of shared leadership. The model recognizes that leadership can be exercised by individuals at different levels and positions within the organization and that different people can lead in various contexts depending on their expertise and abilities leading to the benefit of increasing the decision-making power of personnel (Spillane, 2005; Ospina, 2017; Ansell et al., 2020). For Spillane (2005) and Bryson et al. (2006) distributed leadership is a practice between multiple actors: many people in an organization can exercise leadership being committed to achieving the organization's goals (Harris, 2008). Exactly who these people are is not the key issue, but rather the practice they create together (Bolden, 2011; Bennett et al., 2003).

In addition, distributed leadership stresses flexibility, where leadership roles are not static and can shift depending on the situation and need (Spillane, 2005; Harris, 2005). Finally, distributed leadership is marked by collaboration and cooperation, with an emphasis on working together and leveraging the strengths and competencies of different individuals (Rosenholtz, 1989). Collaboration is an important element of public leadership (Hansen and Villadsen, 2010) because governmental hierarchies shifted toward a networking type of governance (Kirlin, 1996; Provan and Kenis, 2008; Klijn et al., 2015). However, leadership is also a prerequisite for effective collaboration in the absence of control and hierarchical power (Morse, 2010). Distributed leadership became a prominent concept in public sector research because of its tendency toward time-, space-, context- and membership-bound configurations of influence-based relationships (Gronn, 2009; Ospina, 2017; Backhaus and Vogel, 2022) that are not bound to any pattern (Harris, 2008; Jakobsen et al., 2021).

Over time, attitudes to leadership have changed. The heroic ideal has given way to the post-heroic – in other words, from the autocratic to the more democratic (Škerlavaj, 2022). This was proved by studies from the USA, UK, Australia and Sweden. According to the analysis of changing attitudes in former Soviet countries (Gill and Negrov, 2021), it might also be logical to expect a post-heroic leadership ideal to emerge in Ukraine despite the fact it is working under multiple crises during a war. In conflict situations, heroic leaders promise quick fixes to all problems and can easily be idealized. Conflict, however, might be conducive to a more distributed leadership style because many parts of an organization on different levels need to cooperate. This article aims to identify the type of leadership ideals Ukraine’s public managers hold during the Russo-Ukrainian war.

This section describes and explains our case study and the method used for gathering and analyzing our empirical material. The study can be defined as explorative for two reasons: first, for the first time since independence, Ukraine is counteracting Russia’s attempt at full-scale war; and second, this is for the first time when scholars have explored what Ukrainian public servants think about leadership during the war. We decided to study public servants because they serve as a buffer zone between political uncertainty and society. On the one hand, these individuals assist in maintaining the functioning of the state apparatus; on the other hand, they help people access vital services.

We use the Russia–Ukraine war as an example of ongoing multiple crises and how perceptions of leadership are expressed during a wartime situation. However, we must address the sociolinguistic nuance of understanding crisis, conflict and the war in Ukraine. In Ukrainian culture, the war is understood as a broader concept comprising multiple crises and public leaders would consider it inappropriate to directly equate the war to the concept of crisis. The same discrepancy might be seen with a term conflict being coined as “a soft concept” compared to the war.

In line with other researchers, we view the case study method as reliable, valid and legitimate (Yin, 2014). Our case study is based on the Ukrainian public service. We carefully selected our interviewees from the point of view of their expertise, experience and training in public administration to represent different levels of government: national, regional and local. Our objective with this study is to learn how public managers think about leadership in the midst of a war marked by multiple crises.

This paper reflects the results of the analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews with members of different parts of Ukraine’s public service conducted between September and October 2023. The interpretation of this evidence is based on the approach that “what is important is the quality and total amount of interview material” that is gathered, “not the sheer number of participants” (Magnusson and Marecek, 2015, p. 36). Therefore, we decided to study a smaller number of participants, but to do it thoroughly with the help of an extended interview guide.

The participants work in the public service in various parts of the country – Kyiv, Poltava, Sumy, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Khmelnytskyi and Chernivtsi regions. Such an approach ensured comprehensiveness, because public servants in Ukraine’s different regions have had different experiences and therefore might have different perceptions of leadership. For example, when parts of Ukraine were occupied, some participants had to leave their regions. Other regions became busy managing internally displaced persons because they are geographically close to the hostilities and were used as transit zones by people fleeing the war.

The participants work for Ukraine’s central government, in both ministries and public agencies (3), its regional branches (6) as well as in local government (6). Most of the interviewees occupy mid-level management positions (8/15). The 6 men and 9 women who were interviewed range in age from 30 to 42 years.

What makes the attitudes expressed by these individuals distinctive is that most have experience working at both the local and central government levels. As well, all of them stayed in Ukraine when the full-scale Russian invasion started and since then have been performing their official duties alongside the additional work of resolving various emergencies and crises caused by the war.

The interviews were conducted individually via the Zoom platform. The remote mode of interviewing participants for this study was necessitated by constant air raids and electricity blackouts. The duration of every interview was about an hour. The respondents consented to the use of data obtained during the interviews for research purposes. Every talk was video recorded with each participant’s consent and transcribed verbatim. The language of the interview was native both to the interviewees and the interviewer who transcribed and translated the interviews into English. The data was handled in correspondence with the procedure and standards outlined by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority and the Act Concerning the Ethical Review of Research Involving Humans (SFS 2003:460).

For the interviewing purposes, an extended questionnaire guide was elaborated around decision-making during the Russo-Ukrainian war. The interviews being semi-structured by nature created space for the participants to speak and share what they wanted in a form of a friendly talk. Thus, the leadership theme emerged naturally in the respondents’ discourse.

In our text analysis, we searched for themes and traced the process working abductively toward a more theoretical understanding of what type of leadership is idealized by public managers in the context of war with multiple ongoing crises.

The rigor of the study was ensured by performing double independent coding. The data was analyzed and interpreted by all of the researchers involved in the study. At the beginning of the analysis, the data was coded and analyzed by every researcher individually. A bilingual researcher worked with the data obtained in the respondents’ native language; English-speaking researchers worked with translations of the transcripts of the interviews. Having done this, the results were discussed by the researchers in a group.

The interview narratives obtained from the Ukrainian public managers is full of valuable insights reflecting their perceptions of leadership. The results section divides these views into four aspects of the development of leadership ideals among Ukraine’s public servants. The quotations exemplify respondents’ attitudes to the themes, so the researchers used generalizing quotations to omit abundant repetition in the text.

The leadership style that was practiced in Ukraine prior to 2014 is described as purely autocratic. The participants describe their work as following a strict hierarchy and say that employees had little autonomy in how they could behave at their workplaces. Ukrainian public administration had a strong vertical distribution of power and was in the “strong grip” of senior managers who were unwilling to speak directly with their staff. According to one interviewee, there were no chances to share any ideas with top management. This is what he said in response to a question about hierarchy and autonomy in office before 2014:

Participants tend to explain this autocratic style by referring to the Soviet ideology and management mentality of the time, which emphasized obedience and subordination as determinants of public leadership. In contrast to the unwillingness of Soviet style managers to take suggestions from below, top managers were described as highly involved in ensuring the rules from the top were applied down the organizational hierarchy. For example, neglecting the dress code could result in a visit to the director. That interviewee continued dwelling upon vertical hierarchy: “I remember once I came to work without a tie and the boss summoned me and asked: ‘Where is your tie?’”

Since 2014, the participants have noticed a shift toward a more collectivistic type of leadership. They explain how this change is tied more to the personalities of different leaders rather than to a political change that occurred on a particular date. Their experience is that collective leadership is more of a will-based phenomenon. For example, another participant commented on the historical perspective of how decisions were made before 2014, since the war started in 2014, and since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022 and that he once had a “democratic” leader who listened to his colleagues. Between 2015 and 2020, this interviewee’s district was among the top 10 most effective in the country. However, after this interviewee became a head of administration, he felt that his managers did not listen to him. Comments like this point to a generational rupture that is causing delays in the shift toward more collective leadership ideals: in other words, senior staff shaped by the Soviet era seek to hold on to a heroic leadership ideal while younger administrators are more Western-oriented in their attitudes.

Another interviewee, for example, said in her interview when responding to the question about management style and leadership that senior managers have skills acquired under the Soviet period and perceive young, qualified professionals as their rivals. The young professionals in this study declare their support for a greater democratization of work and horizontal empowerment. They want to do more. They want to be directly involved in all aspects of the job they are doing. They want to see their departments progress and achieve better results. The failure to implement horizontal empowerment is reported to be a hindrance toward work progress and a waste of time. For example, she explained in response to the question about the desire to be more engaged in decision-making within the organization that in her department it is ordinary employees who prepare materials for their department heads to present at an event. In her opinion, to make departmental work smoother and easier, ordinary employees should be presenting at events themselves. Other participants expressed similar views about limited access to the pool of opportunities when doing their jobs.

The interviewees state that since 2014 public leaders have started to involve their colleagues in decision-making and thus share public leadership with them. This process is still underway and, as one participant put it, “democratic” public leadership in Ukraine is currently “switching toward the European standards” when commenting decision-making in a pre-war time and during the ongoing war.

Shared leadership has not happened all at once because of some concrete action; it has been naturally introduced as the capacities of top managers, who had an approach of listening to colleagues and an openness toward new ideas, have been extended. The participants describe Ukrainian middle management today as idea-generators and top managers as idea-takers in the generation and implementation of initiatives.

Such an approach toward public leadership has reinforced motivation at work, the civil servants explain, because they are part of the process now and their ideas matter in a way that had not been the case previously. Even though they are not always in a position of influence, they feel they now contribute to decision-making. Implementing these decisions makes them feel empowered still further – they are sharing in the co-creation of new values. This is how one respondent explained her motivation:

However, it is still possible to observe a heroic leadership discourse in the participants’ interviews. For example, one interviewee defined charismatic leadership by describing one manager who she greatly admired because of a certain set of qualities when asked to assess the management style in her organization: “Although my manager is a woman, she’s as courageous as a real warrior. She took everything on her shoulders and “dragged” the whole department.”

Interestingly, collectivistic attitudes toward public leadership are expressed by the collegial decision-making power of several participants in the process. When defining decision-making, most participants called it a collaborative process in their responses. We can use one participant’s definition as characteristic of the larger group: “Decision-making is a sum of certain actions of some people to whom the situation concerns.”

Since the full-scale war started, the challenges for the Ukrainian public servants have increased. Participants described their work environment now as more serious, often distressing and less understandable. Government departments have mostly focused on solving problems, which, in most cases, demand situational responses. One interviewee recollected the biggest challenge of the war as “the first day of the war” challenge:

The interviewees emphasize that distributed leadership is what has been exercised in the context of this ongoing war. One conclusion is that it was possible to idealize this style of leadership because attitudes had already started to change before the war broke out. From what the participants said, the need for distribution can be explained, in part, by the need for solutions to emergencies and threats. For example, there needs to be coordination from some governmental agency on the behavior the public should adopt during explosions or missile attacks. In response to the question about additional measures to ensure her organization’s resilience and sustainability, one participant stated, “the Ministry of Emergency, and the police came and visited us. They coordinated what to do during explosions, missile attacks, where to run and to hide.”

On the other hand, the need for collective public leadership can be explained by the new challenges that exist now to deliver public services in the midst of multiple crises during an ongoing war. Now there is a real need to involve several different agencies and distribute leadership among them. For example, in response to the question about official and practical “de facto” changes provoked by the full-scale war, one respondent talked about issuing passports to Ukrainians who had fled abroad when Russia’s full-scale invasion began:

Other participants named cases when civil society was given a greater voice in decision-making than the administration. For example, in the case of “renaming the streets,” public servants and civil society actors cooperated so closely to remove Russian origins in the names of streets and cities that the public servants accepted the suggestions that people made. Leadership was distributed to civil society actors in making the final decisions about new street names. A representative from local self-government recollected that “we suggested general names but having heard civil society we took what they offered.”

The participants’ perceptions reflect how, because of the introduction of martial law, organizing the additional tasks related to, for example, civil defense, public leadership had to be distributed. According to one interviewee, it was extremely stressful in the beginning because it was something he was dealing with for the first time – to equip shelters for the public. His response was to never pause until the problem was solved. Another interviewee described how her roles started to overlap as she had to act both as a manager and an employee. A third respondent, when asked about her role in decision-making processes since the full-scale war began, confirmed the necessity of collaborative creativity, and explained how she introduced in her work unit times when staff could recharge and do some mental relaxation because the work was very exhausting. Almost everyone is involved in practicing mindfulness as it helps to develop the stamina necessary to act situationally when needed. Many of the interviewees practice it locally and give the situational lead to those with expertise.

Another new domain is volunteering. One respondent recollected when answering the question about biggest challenges and problems since the full-scale Russia’s invasion that for the first six months after the invasion he volunteered to work with humanitarian aid: “Managers delegated me, they didn’t force me, but it was my initiative.”

The participants feel a strong sense of responsibility when performing their management roles. They are deeply influenced by the context in which they are working, where people’s lives are at stake. One interviewee, who lives in a part of Ukraine far from the hostilities and works with displaced persons, explained how they were doing everything possible to help. She and her colleagues felt very responsible for the people who had fled to their region. Another participant also mentioned hope and faith during his interview, but for the sense of responsibility when commenting on how he coped with problems and challenges of the war as a leader and what gave him strength, he responded: “Hope and faith that people are standing behind you and you’re worrying not only for yourself, but the whole community … people are standing behind my decisions.”

The participants argue that this feeling of responsibility is probably good for public leaders because it helps maintain their personal internal resilience. This sense of responsibility is often incited as a reason for acting situationally, which ended up as a case of distributed leadership as practice.

Another key determinant in how leadership is enacted, according to the participants, is the desire to help people. The participants describe the good feeling they get when helping everybody inside and outside their public organizations and when practicing leadership in a distributive way depending on the situation. Answering the question about drastic changes in decision-making since the full-scale war began, encompassing both official texts and practical situations, one of the female interviewees emphasized “Our activities were focused on help. We had some local targeted programs endorsed. This is what we could do at the local level.”

This willingness to help people concerns not only the public for which their department is responsible, but it also encompasses care for departmental employees. In this context, the interviewees define “real leadership” as the realization that people are standing behind the leaders and nobody is left behind in opposition or disagreement. This distribution of leadership helped one interviewee in an acute situation in his department, on 24 February 2022. He recollected that:

According to the interviewees, the distributed nature of public leadership in Ukraine has been caused by three dimensions that have been shaping daily life in the public agencies since the full-scale Russian invasion:

• (1)

  Civil law –Ukrainian public servants had to take decisions under severe turbulence and uncertainty and operate beyond their regular powers.

• (2)

  Martial law – New tasks were entrusted to the public service, such as civil defense. The organization and mode of work changed. Some organizations switched to a remote form of working; they were literally distributed.

• (3)

  Volunteering – Managers and other public servants acted situationally in helping to solve emerging crises in synergy with other stakeholders, such as international organizations, civil society groups and other collections of volunteers.

When analyzing the interviews, we noticed that participants expressed their attitudes about leadership in terms of different time phases and in a developing way. In the first part of the results section, public managers expressed their perceptions of ideal leadership as a transfer from an autocratic style to one that is more collectivistic in orientation. The second part discusses the expression of distributed approaches toward leadership in public administration. In the third part, we describe the way Ukraine’s public servants understand distributed leadership based on empirical examples they provided. What emerges is how the leadership ideal has moved from heroic to post-heroic and the idealization of distributed leadership. It has also become clear that the acute nature of war had consolidated the ideal of distributed leadership. The final part discloses some factors explaining why distributed leadership both might be developed and sustained during a war with numerous ongoing crises.

The study is limited by the subjectivity of its participants’ perceptions. We therefore cannot guarantee the objectivity of their impressions regarding the transformation in public sector leadership in Ukraine. Rather, we seek to identify and analyze what participants think and feel and how they reason about leadership during the war. In addition, the study was conducted during the full-scale war, so it has some restrictions. For example, it was impossible to conduct face-to-face interviews because of constant air raids and combined missile and drone attacks. Moreover, permanent electricity blackouts and alarms created hindrances for remote interviews, which were overcome by adjusting to the situations the respondents were in.

Leadership and perceptions of leadership are an ever-present issue in times of crisis and war. Some scholars argue that crises require more collectivistic leadership, while others suggest that leadership tends to become more autocratic during turbulent times. Previous studies have shown that attitudes about leadership have changed in former Soviet countries, with a growing trend toward the ideals of democratic leadership. This study aims to explore the leadership perceptions of public managers working in ongoing crises provoked by Russia’s war in Ukraine. The question analyzed in this text is what conceptions of leadership are expressed by these public managers. As shown, a change in the perception of ideal leadership had already started when Ukraine was invaded in 2014. As the country had begun to move closer to the West and the EU in the years after independence, the participants argued that a change in the perception of leadership had followed. This change in the culture and values surrounding leadership seems to have persisted and even intensified with the full-scale Russian invasion. The leadership ideal during the war, as expressed by the participants in this study, is collectively distributed in its form.

In an organizational sense, the war has changed the normal way of life, thinking and functioning. New challenges and threats caused by the military crisis have demanded an adjustment in how the public agencies are able to ensure the normal functioning of Ukraine’s state apparatus to ensure the effective delivery of public services to its citizens. Officials are now frequently obliged to act situationally and locally because of the lack of time and the high stakes, as the participants’ perceptions demonstrate in their expressions of distributing leadership and taking situational responsibility (Ansell et al., 2020). This distribution is in some part predetermined by a concern for colleagues. Distribution is used for the sake of both organization and employee. On the one hand, employees are distracted from the pressure, fear and chaos while being busy and, on the other hand, the organization gets more work done. Collaboration and cooperation, as outlined by Rosenholtz (1989), Hansen and Villadsen (2010) and Morse (2010) as signs of distributed leadership not only outside but also within organizations, help to maintain a positive internal climate by conserving and bolstering the strengths of employees. An example of this was organizing colleagues with psychological experience to lead short recharge sessions. A positive example of enhanced collaboration might be sharing ideas between the central and regional branches of a governmental department about new initiatives or “success stories,” which could easily be disseminated and reproduced among all branches about, for example, reaching consensus on how to proceed next. These cases are very much in line with the situational and ad hoc emergence of distributed leadership described by Harris (2008) and Bryson et al. (2006).

As the interviewees showed, this distribution of leadership was a natural response to the new threats and challenges caused by the war. Suddenly, civil servants had to manage a lack of time, situational crises, space shortages and working daily in a new context of turbulence and uncertainty. For example, some regions were partly occupied and experiencing armed conflict, while other regions became a transit zone for displaced people fleeing the hostilities. Thus, “everybody doing something in their place” reflects the perception of distributed leadership expressed by Gronn’s (2009) concept of time-, space-, context- and membership-bound configurations of influence-based relationships, as well as context-boundness described by Ospina (2017).

Importantly, this distribution leadership during the full-scale war is built on the “prepared soil” of the reforms emphasizing collectivistic leadership since 2014 and put in place in the lead up to EU accession. This idea of leadership is a result of the transfer of cultural ideals about leadership from the West. The participants see this as the big change and as the start of a new era of leaders capable of thinking differently. It was by sharing their leadership roles and listening to others that allowed senior managers in the Ukrainian public service to significantly improve the operations of their public agencies (Döös and Wilhelmson, 2021). The distribution of leadership in public governance reflects the consolidation of civil society and a growing public oversight over governmental decision-making.

We think that this practice of a new form of leadership, increasingly in place since 2014, allowed a more significant switch to distributed leadership during the full-scale war of 2022. These gradual changes prior to 2022 prepared the soil and made a soft transition from autocratic to collectivistic leadership possible.

For understanding the ideals of distributed leadership in ongoing crises of war showcased by Ukraine’s public leaders, it is important to understand not only why this distribution happened but also how it was happening. Based on the analysis of participants’ perceptions, we suggest the following systematization of distributed leadership:

• (1)

  Intraorganizational distributed leadership. This distribution concerns the operations of individual departments and was performed via role-switching, which placed a priority on the situational skills needed in a particular time, space and context. Formal relationships about the tasks to be performed are sometimes blurred and without the time necessary to consult with management, situational responses prevail and empowerment takes place.

• (2)

  Intergovernmental distributed leadership arises from delivering services and care for people and colleagues in changing turbulent situations, which requires the distribution of public leadership among several organizations when solving problems. For example, a new approach to issuing passports required the Migration Service and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to collaborate, and the distribution of public information on “behavior during a missile attack” involved the Ministry of Emergency, the police and a public agency.

• (3)

  Intersectoral distributed public leadership encompasses the distribution of leadership among all stakeholders. Humanitarian aid and volunteering groups working alongside public servants is a good example of this. The case of “renaming the streets” reflects distribution of leadership to public opinion, although authorities are not obliged to accept the results of public oversight.

We may observe from the participants’ perceptions that intergovernmental and intersectoral distributed public leadership were directed for the most part at emergency issues and had a problem-solving orientation. They thus require an even greater degree of cooperation and give the potential lead to a competent organization(s) from different level(s) of government or even different sectors.

The findings of the research can inform leadership development programs offering a new approach toward leadership in crisis, conflict and beyond. It could be used as a backbone during public administration reforms with a focus toward a more collectivistic form of leadership, crisis development strategies in Ukraine and similar contexts for development of frameworks and management models. Other countries could also benefit from the findings of the study by training and preparation for times of uncertainty, taking hereby a proactive stance and position. For training purposes, the results of the study can be used as a case study during courses about leadership, decision-making, change in governance and public management. The model of distributed leadership comprising intraorganizational, intergovernmental and intersectoral forms of distributed leadership depicted in this study can be directly replicated in practice.

The new, more collectivistic ideal of leadership within Ukraine’s public service has persisted and been strengthened because of the Russian invasion, according to this study of its public managers. In this paper, we have tried to resolve the main research question: what perceptions of ideal leadership are public managers in the Ukrainian public sector expressing during the war?

Ukraine’s public managers expressed the transfer from autocratic to collectivistic leadership since the Russian war began in 2014 and after the full-scale invasion in 2022. They think reforms intended for EU accession led to a change of cultural ideals with collectivistic leadership styles prevailing in public administration since 2014. Participants consider these practices made it possible to develop a distributed form of public leadership in Ukraine during a war characterized by ongoing crises. Together with the robustness of distributed leadership during the war – the responsibility and care-oriented actions drive distributed leadership to evolve. We ascertained that distribution was probably caused by each organization’s diverse areas of responsibility, which needed to take charge of themselves to a much greater degree. Finally, based on perceptions of the participants from Ukraine’s public service organizations, we have identified more nuanced forms of distributed leadership – intraorganizational, intergovernmental and intersectoral.

Areas for further research could comprise the long-term sustainability of collectivistic leadership ideals, as well as the effectiveness of distributed leadership in non-crisis settings. Besides, their results could be used for developing models of distributed leadership in public administration at different levels of governance and multi-level governance.

The findings of the study have also certain implications for Ukrainians in the post-war period and might be used in further public administration reforms toward the EU full-fledged membership. International organizations could be enlightened about leadership perceptions and practices in Ukraine for building rigorous cooperation framework and to contribute to the intersectoral form of distributed leadership even better.

The authors express a special gratitude to Dr Tim A. Mau and thank peer reviewers for their contributions to the article.