Female leadership in organizational and personal crises

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Women remain underrepresented in leadership positions worldwide, even though gender-diverse leadership is associated with positive organizational outcomes, especially in times of crisis. This underrepresentation is also evident in Germany and in industries with a high degree of digitalization. While theories such as think crisis–think female and the glass cliff focus on women’s leadership appointments during organizational crises, less is known about how female leaders themselves retrospectively interpret experiences they frame as personal and organizational crises.
To address this gap, a qualitative study was conducted, consisting of 22 episodic interviews with female leaders from highly digitalized industries in Germany, held between July and October 2023. Using the GABEK® method, the study reconstructs recurring interpretive patterns and tensions in participants’ narratives.
The findings show that crises are experienced less as discrete events and more as cumulative, biographically embedded processes that span personal-professional and organizational domains. Health-related strain, moral conflicts, legitimacy challenges, and organizational instability intersect over time and become meaningful as crises primarily through retrospective interpretation. Contrary to appointment-centered crisis leadership theories, crisis contexts often reinforce existing hierarchies and gendered power structures instead of opening leadership opportunities for women. Leadership in crisis is therefore not interpreted as a distinct female leadership style, but as a relational and meaning-oriented practice shaped by biography, organizational context, and prolonged uncertainty.
Building on these findings and highlighting lived experience and retrospective sensemaking, the study contributes to research on gender issues in the context of crisis leadership by conceptualizing crisis leadership as an ongoing, situational interpretive process embedded in leaders’ biographical trajectories instead of a reaction to discrete crisis events or leadership appointments.